The editorial entitled “The Lost Art Of The Written Word” in a mainstream media daily laments about the incapability of the common man and woman (henceforth J6P for Joe Six Pack or Jane Six Pack) to write proper English.
This is Exhibit A of lamp calling the kettle black considering that this newspaper makes tons of gaffes itself. For example:
On the very day the above editorial was published, the lead story on its front page began with the following sentence: “The Pune International Airport, Maharashtra’s one of the busiest airports…”. This is poor sentence construction. It should be “The Pune International Airport, which is one of the busiest airports in Maharashtra…”.
On another day, it made a bloomer right on its masthead (of all places!).
The minimum temperature in Pune was definitely way above 4 degrees celsius. In fact, the mercury has never fallen so low in the city’s history.
Then there was the mother of all gaffes, again in the temperature section of the masthead.
I leave it to readers to spot it. (see footnote 1 if you can’t).
It’s not only this MSM.
Many media outlets, including those with the cachet of FORTUNE magazine, regularly conflate lakhs, crores, millions, billions, and trillions; and frequently mislabel charts.
The world’s second largest business daily often uses SMS language (see footnote 2):
- “yr” for year
- “mths” for months
- “c.” for century
I wrote back to the author of the aforementioned editorial pointing out the bloomers made by her reporters. I also felt her tips to J6P to use Wren and Martin to improve their written English were better directed at reporters in her own newspaper. In fact, her reporters need them more since their articles are read by zillions of people as against emails and slide decks of J6P that have very small circulation lists in comparison.
On a side note, phrases from Wren and Martin may not be all that great in business journalism.
Let me take the following sentence from the op-ed titled “Can India ride out Trump tariff tempest” in another MSM daily: “Electricity production, …, fell no less than 5.3%”. Then there are other sentences like “inflation went up a shade below 2%”.
While they may come from Wren and Martin, expressions like “no less” and “a shade below” are directionally opposite to “went up”, and jar when used alongside numbers.
I’d recommend “Electricity production fell by nearly 5.3%”, and “inflation went up nearly 2%”. They’re easier to read and subtract anything from the context.
FOOTNOTE(S):
- The max and min temperatures are interchanged.
- Some 15-20 years ago, Economic Times used to claim that it was the “world’s second largest business daily” (after Wall Street Journal). Given print media’s steady rise in India and fall in USA since then, I won’t be surprised if ET has overtaken WSJ by now. But, since I haven’t heard ET claim that it has become the largest business daily in the world, I’ll continue to refer to it as the #2.
