@McBobbyFresh said:
I've been unable to sleep these past few days. In the absence of rest I've been carousing the internet. I've noticed a lot of sites having news stories filled with simple grammar mistakes. Normally the mistakes are so simple that i ignored them and kept on reading. Lately though the amount of mistakes has risen and it is really starting to bother me. I feel there is no reason for these simple mistakes to be present. It is the journalists job to proof-read their articles because they are the most frequent users of the English language. I really only want one thing. I want Giant Bomb to be the one site without these mistakes. This would earn more respect from me to a site that i already respect the most. Example: Taken from the uDraw article by Patrick Klepek "At aged two and four this proved to be the best game from our selection and he kids happily took turns and played with it,". Now to be honest, he was quoting another person there. My problem is simply adding a "t" to "he" would of been easy and stuck out even though i was enjoying the article. I wouldn't of normally been bothered by this if i had not kept reading and found another mistake in the next sentence. Same article:"In fact they have been playing at at every opportunity since." This has been happening a lot recently at Giant Bomb and even fellow site Tested. Please correctly proof read so these sites can continue being the best sites on the internet.
Welcome to modern journalism. Professional journalists (especially on the internet, but elsewhere, too) often have little or no editorial review before their content is published. It's a line publishers can cross off in the budget and either just count on self-policing (difficult to do on your own material, which is the entire point of proof-readers) or just count on not giving a fuck. After all, it's not as much the quality of what you get out; it's the speed at which you get it out. Beat the next guy to the punch and fix errors in the next post a few hours or days later when there's something new to reveal on the topic at hand. It's hard to go more than two or three articles these days (and it has been this way for a decade or two, frankly) without running into grammar or spelling that should have been caught rather quickly. You'll see gross errors on every blog and news site out there, without exception. Tech sites, syndicated news services, online versions of magazines and newspapers (and the print versions of same).
And if that bothers you, then don't even start to consider the wild inaccuracies and flat out bullshit passed off in countless articles (the Associated Press is pretty well-known to have shitty fact-checking, source-attribution, and sometimes it seems like they and others are just fucking making shit up without looking into what facts actually are). However, I'm not likely to give as much of a fuck when Joystiq or GiantBomb make these mistakes. It's less acceptable when a purported news organization that claims to bear the prestige of "professional degreed journalists" does it.
@Mordukai said:
EDIT:
"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Mordukai is illustrating an important example, here, with this almsot decade-old hoax. Less about grammar and spelling, but more about the bullshit that gets by supposed "journalists" and is reported as "real news" because they don't bother to do any investigation any more, don't bother to actually fact-check, and don't bother to make sure they have a valid source (and preferably always two or more independently confirming sources) for their material. In the example Mordukai is offering, it's the supposed story about how transposing letters in words are interpreted by the brain without a problem as confirmed by a study conducted at Cambridge University. The only problem is that there was never such a study. The entire thing is a fucking hoax, but it has been reported on and passed around endlessly as a real fact. (Not to mention, there's the whole bullshit pedobear stories, the jenkem stories, and the "passing out game" stories, and the sex-coded-jelly-bracelet stories as a few more examples of the media just making shit up or buying into made up shit, rather than being journalists and doing some due diligence).
But, I digress. GiantBomb is the one place I wouldn't hold to the same standard. I mean, they don't exactly have an editorial staff. They just have some dudes who write shit and throw it up online, like every other gaming site. If they get a chance, maybe they proof-read it or have one of the others proof-read it before hitting "publish" in their CMS. If they were purporting to have a full professional editorial staff and they were all about "journalism!(tm)", then I might be more nit-picky. But they aren't.
All of that having been said, everyone should put emphasis on the importance of both how and what they're writing. Especially anyone representing themselves professionally or doing so as a business (as GiantBomb does, for example - or as a doctor writing an essay would). But, without a full editorial department and a full editorial review process (as is usually lacking in all online publishing), shit is simply going to get through. Fairly often.
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