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Miami Herald Has 133 Grammar Errors in 1 Issue: Cutbacks Symptom
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by Jordan Yerman | February 1, 2010 at 12:45 pm
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An English teacher found 133 grammatical and spelling errors in the January 18th edition of the Miami Herald. The Miami Herald's Edward Schuacher-Matos gave his own publication some tough love, submitting a copy to editor and former teacher Elaine Kenzel, who is not shy with the red pen.
To find 133 errors is bad, to be sure, but it's also an expected result of layoffs throughout the newspaper industry. A newspaper isn't just churning out copy for the next day, but for real-time publishing online. For the Miami Herald-and every other paper- this means lightning-quick turnaround, which means a greater likelihood of errors.
Having said that, 133 errors across an entire edition isn't that bad, considering the number of misspellings, malapropisms, misuses of homonyms, and other grammatical mistakes you see in the average blog post: we've had submissions with five misspellings in a single sentence.
My own first drafts are rife with typos; I always need to double-check my own work, and stuff still slips past.
Since the barrier to publication is nonexistent, and copy editors are fewer in number, the medium-term answer would seem to be for teachers and students to take grammar lessons in school a little more seriously ,so we don't end up like in Idiocracy.
I was astounded, but she was surprised that there weren't more mistakes, given the tremendous amount of copy, much of which is written and edited quickly on deadline.
Some of the errors, moreover, were stylistic, such as beginning a sentence with ``but'' or ``and.'' Her acceptance of them may be rule No. 1 in grammar: ``A journalist's style and level of word choice (and that of everyone who communicates) must take into consideration the audience, and the `flavor' of the writer must be maintained.''
Kleinman, a veteran newsman of 25 years who remains passionate about his craft, was pained by the Kenzel report but notes that mistakes have always slipped through. ``We're basically putting out a small book in a few hours,'' he said. ``Still, nothing hurts more than getting up in the morning, getting the paper and finding some glaring mistake that you should have found the previous night.''
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Jordan Yerman
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 01:32 on February 2nd, 2010
You are making a valid point here Jordan. Layoffs have repercussions and can end up harming the business that made those in order to save cost of operation. Resulting in loss of business.