Wikipedia:But actually...

Try to avoid writing things like the following:

John went to the bar. But he actually went to the marina.

This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article or a Wikipedia policy, as it has not been reviewed by the community.

The second sentence is contradicting the first. Both can't be true simultaneously. Either John went to the bar or he went to the marina. We have a template to tag this—{{Contradictory inline}}—but it's better to have avoided the contradiction in the first place.

Sometimes, the second sentence is added by an editor who noticed that the first sentence isn't correct, but doesn't bother to rewrite the sentence (or paragraph) to properly fix it, and so simply tacks the correction on at the end, without modifying the incorrect sentence. This can confuse the reader, as they've just been told information that they were later told was incorrect. So why was the incorrect information mentioned to begin with?

If something is incorrect, be bold and fix it! That means being bold and rewriting entire sentences, or even paragraphs, if needed. Just don't leave the article in a poor, confused state of contradictory sentence fragments.