Illiteracy

The Age (the popular broadsheet newspaper in Melbourne) has sunk to the level of Slashdot. From Peter Martin’s article entitled “Choice considers Grocery Choice suit” published today:

First, a costumer enters a postcode, then selects the most convenient nearby shops and then enters the quantities, weights and brands of the products they want.

That isn’t a simple transposition typo — there are two letters between the transposed letters. It’s either a chronic misunderstanding of the language or an inability to type combined with an over-reliance on a spell-checker. What happened to proof-reading and copy editing? What happened to knowing how to spell? This is what you would expect from self-obsessed bloggers or tweeters, not professional journalists!

(There is a remote possibility that he chose a random occupation in order to flesh out the hypothetical shopper’s character, and just made a choice that unfortunately looks like a common error. However, this is no excuse — if this was the case, he should have chosen a more interesting profession, like pool cleaner for instance.)

This entry was posted on Monday, 29 June, 2009 at 10:40 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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