By now, most school districts around the country have begun another academic year. Many students complete their writing assignments on computers, but such technological wonders as a spell checker, formatting tools and a pop-up dictionary/thesaurus don’t seem to be helping high school graduates succeed at writing. Consider this recent news item from The Huffington Post: In 2012, high school graduates attained an average score of 488 on the writing portion of the SAT. This is […]
proofreading
6 posts
Do you get frustrated when other people misuse apostrophes, or are you a misuser yourself? Do you agree that “reading is the gateway to whatever we want to do” and that “nothing leaves a bad first impression like a poorly written or poorly punctuated email”? And do you simply enjoy words because they’re words? If you answered “yes” to any of the previous questions, you’ll probably enjoy what you’ll see on the Two Lakes Media […]
“Weird Al” Yankovic, king of pop-song parodies, has done more for the English language this week than some teachers do in a year. To promote his latest album, Mandatory Fun — which contains parodies of Pharrell’s “Happy” (“Tacky”), Lorde’s “Royals” (“Foil”) and Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” (“Handy”) — “Weird Al” is in the midst of releasing eight videos in eight days. On Tuesday, he issued the best of the bunch so far, “Word Crimes,” a clever take […]
I hate typos, but we’re all guilty of making them. What really frustrates me, as a writer and editor, is seeing completely inexcusable typos. Near downtown Madison, Wis., for example, a restaurant illuminates a fluorescent sign every single night that reads: “Immediate Seatnig.” Lately I’ve noticed typos in one public place where they should never be: School buildings. We’re supposed to put the education of future generations in the hands of individuals who can’t even spell-check […]
Once upon a time, record labels would send music journalists batches of LPs (and later CDs) with fancy folders containing everything a writer would want to know about the album and the artist. As the significance of record companies dwindled, DIY artists took promotional matters into their own hands, and that’s when things got frustrating for reviewers like me. Sure, we loved the free tunes but got tired of reading the penciled cursive writing on […]
Between 1995 and mid-2013, when I was managing editor of three business-to-business magazines, the quality of press releases, submitted articles and social media posts slowly but steadily declined. Companies that laid off their marketing people years ago — no doubt presuming that “anyone can write a press release!” — would email me three pages of information about some amazing new product, but then refer to its name three different ways. Worse, some businesses didn’t even […]