As a retired teacher of high school English, I am constantly dismayed by much of the material produced today by so-called experts.
Words starting with capitals where the offending members of the alphabet should be in lower case, major over-use of commas, and ampersands used instead of the spelt-out “and”.
Don’t the geniuses writing this stuff realise that useless capitals slow down one’s reading by making the brain think there is a reason to pause?
Don’t they appreciate that the short “and”, a strange symbol to use in the middle of a sentence, does exactly the same?
Most of the aforementioned basic errors are committed by social media adherents but they also appear in printed material, often produced on glossy paper with excellent colored photos.
A couple of recent examples were observed by this old grump at the Beenleigh Historical Village and Museum.
I’d arranged to meet a couple of friends and because it was a hot day I waited for them in the air-conditioned reception area, where there was plenty of stuff to read.
That selection included an A4 sheet appealing for more people to involve themselves in the village as volunteers.
In that piece a lengthy sentence outlining the various ways one could be of assistance had heaps of ampersands and unnecessary capitals and woeful punctuation.
Had the perpetrator never heard of the KISS principle and the judicious use of bullet points?
A little guide book extolling the virtues of the various attractions had obviously been put together by someone who had learnt to use a desktop publishing program but lacked basic English language knowledge and had zero knowhow when it came to layout.
Those examples of the bastardisation of our language may have been assembled by volunteers and maybe that is an excuse.
But surely somewhere among the village’s constituents there is someone sufficiently smart to function as a proof reader.
The place seemed to have run down a bit since the last time I visited a few years back and maybe the printed material is the symptom of a disease.
The place deserves to survive but don’t hold your breath if it’s use of the printed word is any indication.
