Pet Peeves

Having spent much of my life reading and writing, I find it particularly disturbing that, generally speaking, the quality and caliber of writing today is going downhill. It’s one thing to deal with those who use internet shorthand like LOL and BRB (and really, folks, we are no longer dealing with painfully slow and expensive dialup, so there is little need for most of those emoticons and shorthand anagrams these days.

What I find really frustrating is the spelling and grammar and punctuation of those in journalism. Hey, these are the folks who spent 16 years getting an education so they could communicate the news to the rest of the world. I don’t think it’s too much to expect their level of literacy to be higher than a fifth grader!  Does every TV news story need to begin with “It happened at…” (I realize the transcriber is working off the videotaped news story in the case of TV news, but some of these reporters really need to branch out and get a vocabulary!)  And

I love it when someone is trying to “sale” something (it’s SELL…if you sell it in a store, you have it FOR SALE, but SALE is not a verb, unless you’re my cousin who needs absolutely no excuse to shop ’til she drops). This seems to be a really common error, as I’ve seen it in newspapers and on websites for the media. And of course, the incorrect use of apostrophes is almost constant.  Didn’t anyone learn the rules for this punctuation in grade school? If it’s a plural, there is NO apostrophe, the apostrophe is for possesive designation (like I’m going to Mike’s house). 

These are the kinds of things you can’t rely on grammarcheck and spellcheck to point out, it comes from knowing and actually reading the language (and preferably something of higher caliber than the comics)