The “the high cost of connecting two lines” should of course be “the high cost of connecting to lines” – unless the journalist meant something completely different in which case the whole sentence should have been written differently. Sigh. It shouldn’t be this hard to read the paper.
This is at the very least rather
Read it for yourself here: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/george-in-a-spin-over-noisy-wind-power-x2026-20090920-fwsl.html
Golly, Troy. A blog all about a tiny spelling error?
ReplyDeleteNitpicky would be about right, I think.
Hello Troy, I think this a great idea and I wish you well. I'm a lawyer and find the same frustration with a decline in the standard of legal writing. I'm fed up with other lawyers writing to say they will "revert to me" - they should be so lucky.
ReplyDeleteI have book-marked your site and will revert to it regularly.
Kevin B
Hi Steve,
ReplyDeleteI wonder what quantum of nitpicks make a problem. I *feel* that it's a problem right now so it's probably worth taking a few flames just to get it off my chest.
OTOH, I'm not getting paid to write this blog, nor am I scratching around for ways to save my industry. But if I was doing either, quality would have to be a good starting point. So there's a credible premise behind this - even if there are a lot more important things going on in the world than this.
So in that sense I hope this is a short-lived blog! As soon as there are no (stupid, frequent, noticeable) errors, I'll stop.
Let's see how many mistakes I actually find. Remember I'm not actively reading articles to find errors - I'm just reporting what I naturally come across on a day to day basis.
So far it's 3 for 3 since I started counting 3 days ago.
(I'm interested to analyse the data later too - since I started counting I haven't found any errors from one particular news company. Do they have better QC than the other? I wouldn't have thought so, but I can't say either way yet.)