[Don’t do it.]
Though it is a staple of newspaper writing, I always go out of my way to avoid those bracketed words and clauses inside quotes. The assumption is that readers could not possibly use context clues to know what you are talking about. Unlike the editor who once wanted me to insert in a feature on middle schoolers a definition of “pom poms,” I don’t think readers are stupid. (At least not the ones who treat the comments section like a virtual Klan rally.) They can figure out which person a pronoun refers to.
While these always annoy me, I have never seen a more appalling use of this convention than on this Baltimore Sun headline the other day: “We just couldn’t get [dying Haitian] what he needed”
While these always annoy me, I have never seen a more appalling use of this convention than on this Baltimore Sun headline the other day: “We just couldn’t get [dying Haitian] what he needed”
posted by Linda Perlstein at
4:33 PM
4 Comments:
MY FAVE COMMENTS ARE ALWAYS IN ALL CAPS AND REMARK ABOUT HOW STUPID SOMEONE IS AND WRITTING ABOUT I CANT BELEVE HOW DUMB THAT WAS AND STUF LIKE THAT. PEPOLE ARE SO IGNORENT.
wow.....
Cool - now that we've addressed the #1 priority in the education media, what's next?
Yet again, newspaper readers in my community (the dwindling number who remain, I'm sorry to say) have been seriously misinformed about an education topic by the San Francisco Chronicle. The Chronicle recently published a pair of opinion pieces by UC Berkeley education researcher Bruce Fuller praising a San Francisco charter high school as a model of success that was (according to Fuller) achieving "remarkable results." That's inaccurate. Actually, the school in question is one of the lowest-performing San Francisco high schools, and most San Francisco high schools serve more low-income students than the school Fuller praised, so that's not the justification.
The article was simply wrong; the school is not a model of success and is not achieving "remarkable results." I wrote a short, civil letter to the editor that was not published; needless to say, there is no further recourse or means of correcting the false information.
In my view, misleading the reader is the most unforgivable sin in journalism. In this case, the sin was committed by an op-ed editor, not an education writer. In fact, most of the misleading, "I just don't get it" coverage of schools that I've seen (and I read education coverage closely) has been perpetrated by non-education writers who were helicoptering in to write about schools for some reason. (In this case, of course, the perp was not a writer but an editor making a bad news decision.)
Of course, that embarrassing Baltimore Sun headline was also not written by an education writer. If one is going to criticize the work of journalists who are not education writers, I would think that criticizing their spreading of inaccurate information about education and schools would be a high priority too. Need examples? I can provide a string of them.
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