Valkrist wrote: Sun Nov 20, 2022 8:01 am
Deimos wrote: Fri Nov 18, 2022 6:35 pm
It was (and is ) apparent you have written professionally ... your posts are testimony to that.
You write very well. Grammatically, structurally... just exceptionally good writing (which is becoming more and more rare....like, you know, you kinda get what I mean?
)
Well, thank you. That's high praise indeed coming from someone as well-read as you. There's a longstanding joke in academic circles that a diploma in English (also have one in copy editing) is good for one thing, and one thing only... but I like to think that
if people paid just a little more attention to those things you pointed out, and to communication in general, that I wouldn't witness on a daily basis, the atrocities that pass for 'writing'.
Do NOT get me started on that. When I see the most egregious grammatical, vocabulary, spelling errors in articles posted by the WSJ, WaPo, the NYT I just cringe.
Writing here, or an email, I expect errors and I take many liberties myself. But those (just to name a few) are venerable flagship publications and the writing should be impeccable.
And these are errors that should have been eradicated in any 4th grade comp classes. How did these literary incompetents ever get hired? Where are the editors?
Oh, wait, I know...the people that hired them are just as incompetent.
My favorite adjectival errors (see, you got me started )... we will only mention one today (the one that most sets my teeth on edge whenever I read/hear it).
Example: Any quantity of something that has increased has always "increased exponentially". Really? Exponentially? Not linearly or geometrically? Or significantly? Or noticeably?
I'll bet $10000 that 99.99% of the people that use that phrase wouldn't recognize an exponent, or know what to do with it, if their lives depended on it.
Most couldn't even add (sans calculator) two fractions with different denominators, but there they are, mathematical morons, glibly tossing around exponents.
(More examples to come later...)