I can’t bring myself to post a picture of an orgy before Congress. Here’s a nice lizard instead.
When Casey Stengel wondered, “Can’t anybody play this here game?”, he was only talking about baseball. But what about news reporters?
Get a load of this gem from The New York Post.
Proposing to investigate how Hunter Biden paid his hookers, the writer babbled about “foreign and American prostitutes who allegedly cavorted with Hunter Biden before Congress, the Post has learned.”
I wonder when was the last time prostitutes cavorted before Congress. How was the attendance that day?
I had high school English teachers who would have plotzed if any student of theirs ever wrote a howler like that. And they didn’t give you extra credit if you volunteered to have your gender reassigned.
Well, why should our journalists be any better than our dindle in the White House?
Quality writing is gone is all I have to say about it. Basic grammar doesn’t seem to be used any longer. I edit what I write before I’m finished with it and that’s with mostly anything I write except, perhaps, for short notes or reminders. Letters to my pen pals and to old friends who still enjoy receiving snail mail letters, responses to blogs (like this one) or social media posts, and even with my private journaling. I just can’t stand to read material that is full of grammatical errors. I find myself mentally correcting what I’m reading often missing the point of it all.
English was my worst subject, but compared to what I’m seeing in some news stories, I’m way ahead of the pack. 🙂
Someday Joe Collidge might become a journalist.
He couldn’t spell journalist, so he’s already halfway there. 🙂
I concur with Margaret Hfknecht. I hate reading material that is loaded with grammatical errors. Sometimes my reply to a post will take a long time, for I edit my emails and posts such as this. Of course, not as much as I would for a book manuscript or other publication.
For the books I have written, before I hand my manuscript over to an editor, I have reread it and gone over it many many times, rewritten numerous paragraphs until, it’s the best I can do. And then, the editor still makes mince meat out of vast swatches of chapters, and may even delete portions of text I toiled and labored over.
I’m sure most of you already know this, but one thing that has helped my writing, is “Read Aloud Speech,” a program already on my computer, I didn’t find until 8 months or so ago, long after I had published my books. Mine has three different voices and you can control the speed. I used it for my book “Reindeer Don’t Fly,” and to my horror, I found one word, correctly spelled, but the wrong word, sentences with missing wording, and other errors, will my readers ever forgive me? Now that I think about those errors, I blame it on my editor who also missed them.
I don’t read aloud, but I’m always concerned with how the prose will “sound” to the reader. Which word makes the sentence easier to read? Which word contributes most to the flow?
I also have really good editors.
I keep in mind my reader no matter what it is I’m writing.
Well, when I hear my writings read to me, I do catch sentences that do not sound right, wrong word usage and so forth. I have found errors in books written by well known authors, who I am sure also had really good editors, and yet a few slipped by.
The error-free book has yet to be published.