So I'm doing a Diploma in Professional Proofreading and Editng. The assignment calls for editing a document, and I found one. The good news is that it had a lot of problems I could practice on; the bad news is that the magazine had already been published!
The question, of course, is how could the publishers let such tripe go to press. Answer? How the hell should I know?
It's an unfortunate aspect of the media to be more lackadaisical in its attitude, whether it is in content or style. I wouldn't be so concerned if not for the result of this laziness.
The written word, when it is in the public arena, should at least bear some resemblence to the English language. These days, the media is filled with abbreviations and misspelling. It's an unfortunate consequence that children pick up such knowledge and argue when corrected, because it was in the newspaper, magazine, on the television, or billboard.
The education system doesn't help, with some teachers singled out for poor language skills. The idea of 'free expression' should not be a part of our education system; truth should be. Kids will then know how to write an essay, a composition, a letter, an e-mail, a report. The Oxford research on the eye-brain readability of a paragraph currently doing the rounds is, of course, amusing, but also demonstrates a laziness that only encourages poor communication.
We live in a world where isolation from work colleagues (work from home), from friends (on-line chat), from shopping (send an order via the internet) is on the increase. With the preponderance of the written word in the above examples, we should be encouraging children to communicate properly, otherwise, they will be misunderstood and misinterpreted; and whose fault will that be?
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