Friday, March 20, 2015

Is proofreading a lost art?

Sadly fewer and fewer people seem to have much interest in using proper grammar and punctuation. I assume much of the blame rests with the Internet and texting. But more and more I find that supposedly professional publications and websites are guilty of incorrect usage. While I was in Richmond, Virginia, last fall a weekly publication had this headline: Mother of Canada Shooter Crys for Victim, Not Son. Seems like an unlikely misspell, but there you are. But today on HuffPost I saw an even odder headline. Odd because it was missing a necessary hyphen without which the headline lost all of its horror to a kind of sick humor. The headline: Elderly Nun Gang Raped by Robbers in India. Without the hyphen one can imagine a gang of elderly nuns being attacked by robbers instead of a single nun being the tragic victim. While these are only two incidents, I see more and more examples of this kind of carelessness every day.

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