Friday, 15 August 2014

JJ Meldrew on Sloppy Writing.

If I’m a grammar Nazi at all, I’m certainly a lukewarm one. Odd little errors and dialectical idiosyncrasies don’t bother me much, if at all (although misplaced apostrophes and ‘there’ for ‘they’re’ do tend to rankle.) And I have no problem with writers breaking with convention deliberately and for a reason. It’s often one of the things that make a good writer, and poets do it all the time. What bothers me is sheer sloppiness on the part of people who should know better.

There was a news report today about a yellow alert being issued because of expected heavy rain in East Anglia and Central England. It was headed:

Summer is Officially Over

Officially? That’s like saying ‘I literally died of fright.’ You’d think that people who are paid to write words for public consumption would be a little more diligent, wouldn’t you?

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