Monday 14 February 2011

What Can I Say?

These are all mistakes from the first few pages of today's Sydney Morning Herald. There is nothing especially interesting about them, apart from the fact that they are all wrong:










The only one of those that might not be self-evident is the one that says: 'One of the big reasons for the health shake-up was to stop the different levels of government fiddling the books to try to shift costs to each other and increasing transparency so everyone would know it was happening.' Now, either there are two reasons there - stopping the government fiddling the books and also increasing transparency, in which case you can't start the sentence with the phrase, 'One of the big reasons', or the government is fiddling the books to try to shift costs and also to increase transparency. If the latter is the case, what has been printed in the paper is correct; if not, what has been printed in the paper is wrong.

2 comments:

  1. Exactly. Bloody awful journalism. A paragraph containing just one long sentence without any commas should in itself have warned the writer that (s)he was about to enter structural ambiguity territory.

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  2. You need a visa before you go in there.

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