Friday, March 21, 2014

Wherein I rant about the decline of writing skills...

Wherein I rant about the decline of writing skills...  Here's a headline I happened upon this morning:
Assassin bug uses a 'slight of leg' to deceive and subdue physically superior prey
I'm sure the clever headline writer actually meant to say “sleight of leg” – but just wasn't clever enough to spell it correctly.

As recently as 10 or 15 years ago, finding such an obvious error on the pages of a commercial publication was a rare event.  Today it seems to happen nearly every day.  It may simply be that the failures of American public education are now making it into the “professional” workplace.  Whatever the cause, it makes me crazy – my eyes jump right to the error, and my brain has to worker harder (and I'm lazy, dammit!) to understand it.

Like so many times before, I fired off a complaining email.  Only rarely have these complaints been answered by an actual human.  Once (with Scientific American) my complaint netted me a free one year extension on the magazine – which was nice, but then the magazine turned into a lefty mouthpiece and I dropped my subscription, free or not.  So really all my ranting and complaining has achieved nothing at all.

Maybe I should just give up :(

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