From The Washington Post's latest Sotomayor article:
"Cornyn said he did not what to tell his constituents what to think about what he said were competing portraits of her: an activist judge whose speeches praise ethnic pride and describe how life experiences influence decision-making, or a restrained jurist who values precedent and rule of law."
Obviously, the error is that the word "know" is missing in between "not" and "what" near the beginning of the sentence. But without that word -- even if you fill in the blank yourself -- the rest of the sentence dissolves into an unintelligible mess. And it was a long sentence anyway, which is always risky if you're trying to keep the reader interested. I ended up confused by this sentence, and had to read it again. Just letting you all know that typographical errors do cause serious confusion, and must be taken seriously for this reason.
wow. i would have never noticed that. i would have had to read that like a lot to find that. thats crazy. now i understand why professor Banisky will fail us if we spell something or forget a common or something. I never realized it could make that much a difference.
ReplyDeleteYeah, errors like this can totally trip up the reader. If I was sitting on the subway, trying to read some news, and I came across this, I might consider switching to another paper. So when we fail whichever assignments we fail, I think it would be best to recognize that we could lose readership if we were in the "real world" by making mistakes.
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ReplyDeleteKnowing the current situation with newspapers going under, I would probably give the paper the benefit of the doubt. However, if the paper were rife with typos and bad grammar I would definately stop buying that particular paper. I'm a pretty big grammar nut and something like that would drive me insane.
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