A bad wrap

What in the world happened to the text wrapping around an image in the Washington Examiner on Dec. 5, 2023? The first three lines in the left column seem to be the completion of a sentence. But the next paragraph starts with “In,” which possibly should be followed by a date, but there isn’t one in either column. The incoherent words aren’t simply continued from the left column to the right column; “MCPS launched … was a paradox”? And “was a paradox” doesn’t combine with any other words to make a sensible phrase. More words seem to be missing too. In the right column, “gain” between “Marylanders” and “their freedom” would make sense, but neither “gain” nor any other suitable verb is present; “paradox: slaver who the slave trade” should have “a” before “paradox” and some verb (“abetted”?) after “who.”

Where are the missing words? Behind the picture? In decades of layout work in addition to editing, I used PageMaker, QuarkXpress, and InDesign, but I don’t know how someone managed to create this mess. Words seem to be missing from some lines only.

Whether you are editing or laying out pages or both, the lesson here is to examine the final proof. I still recall looking at page proofs with a few other publishing professionals many years ago, and we were dazzled by an illustration the artist had created for an article. Oooh … Aah … Uh-oh! Fortunately somebody noticed that the headline was missing.

Visually, that’s a nice text wrap around the picture in the Examiner. But it’s important to read the results.

The “after” word

The news associated with the trolley crash makes it sound like the driver first slammed into the trolley, then was in a fiery crash in which he died. This Sep. 22, 2023, news item from KYW news radio is doubly wrong: there wasn’t another crash after the driver slammed into the trolley, and the driver didn’t die in the crash, he died in the hospital.

The Sep. 17, 2023, Washington Examiner news item makes it sound like the pilots didn’t die in the crash but afterwards from some other cause.

The same problem is in the Sep. 16, 2023, WTOC item: it indicates that after a shooting, two people were injured; who were they, and how were they injured? More likely, they were injured in a shooting, not after it.

Why are news sources wrongly reporting that things happened after the events that the stories are about? Are the writers getting sloppy? Is the text written by a computer that was poorly trained?

These are glaring errors, not subtle errors. Maybe the news people need a manual, “How to Train Your Artificial Intelligence.”

They is wrong

“They had some serious injuries but thankfully has recovered well and is almost ready to come back to work.”

They has and is? At first I thought that the use of they was an attempt to disguise the identity of the employee, but the text describing the employee bounces back and forth between plural and singular: “they were,” “the employee … was,” “their job,” “put them back.”

The bouncing took place on the excellent Blue Avocado website, which provides resources and advice for nonprofit organizations, and it was part of a question submitted to Blue Avocado’s “Ask Rita” column (ask her your human resources questions).

Blue Avocado’s response employed, as usual, good grammar, so the editing question here is whether the question should have been edited. I say yes, because it was printed anonymously. It evidently came from a reader, but because the reader was not identified, the question need not have been reproduced exactly as written. Blue Avocado used “the employee” and “the employee’s” rather than they, them, and their in the reply and could have done so in publishing the question. It would have made the question easier to read and understand.

What if the question had been presented as a direct quotation from someone? Should it have been edited? In my book The Editor’s Companion I presented differing views on whether direct quotes can be edited: no, said Bill Walsh of the Washington Times; yes, if we have a good reason, said Linda Jorgensen of The Editorial Eye; “Never alter quotations,” said the Associated Press Stylebook. I agree with Bill Walsh and the Associated Press. However, even if the question to “Ask Rita” had been presented as a quotation, it could have had the grammar improved and a note added, saying that it had been edited for grammar.

“When someone uses singular they, they is wrong,” says Steve. You can quote me on that.

Open all night

This sign in Bradley Beach, NJ, is curious. A phantom editor (not I) seems to have removed an extra letter from alcohol. The items are introduced by bullets (those black dots), but there seems to be a stray one off to the right. Maybe somebody changed the rule against pets by removing the word No. The capitalization is erratic: verbs (is, are, and be) are not capitalized, nor is the noun field.

But the strangest part is that the park is open from dusk until dawn. This doesn’t look as if anybody altered it, unless somebody transposed Dusk and Dawn, and indeed the gate to the park was padlocked at three in the afternoon.

This sign apparently needed some editing before it was posted.

Death at a press conference?

The death of a kid on an amusement park ride was sad. This April 18, 2022, caption about it in the Orlando (Florida) Sentinel was sad too, referring to “the death of a 14-year-old patron during a press conference.”

In my book The Editor’s Companion, I commented on a similar caption, which stated that a swimmer “disappeared in the surf” and was “presumed drowned by authorities.”

In both captions, I think that the writer tried to get too much information into one sentence.

One solution to the press conference caption would be to mention the press conference at the end in a separate sentence: “Florida Commissioner of Agriculture and Consumer Services Nikki Fried speaks about the ongoing FDACS investigation into the tragic Orlando drop tower incident that resulted in the death of a 14-year-old patron. At left is state Rep. Geraldine Thompson. She and Fried are shown at a press conference in Orlando on Monday, April 18, 2022.” That’s only three words longer, but even with this edit, the caption could have been shorter, omitting “April 18, 2022.” Just “Monday” would have been enough; my Associated Press Stylebook says, “Use Monday, Tuesday,, etc., for days of the week within seven days before or after the current date.” (The caption was too long anyway: the word the was repeated before ongoing).

These captions are examples of mistaken junction, in which ambiguous arrangement of the words can lead the reader to mistake the meaning. Quality control demands reading what you have written or edited and fixing anything that is unclear or sounds dumb.

Calling all cannibals!

I saw a billboard that said, “Eat Clean Bro.”

“That’s disgusting,” I thought. “I wouldn’t eat my brother even if they washed him.”

But then I looked at the “Eat Clean Bro” website and saw that they had turned bro into something fairly appetizing.

Actually, the company had made an elementary punctuation error and plastered it on a billboard, on a company website, on T-shirts, and goodness knows where else. In standard English, direct address (that is, speaking or writing to someone) is indicated by a comma setting off the name. “Eat your brother, Steve!” would be telling me to eat my brother. “Eat clean brother” is telling me to eat my brother if he’s clean. “Eat clean, bro” with a comma tells me, the bro, to eat clean.

In my book The Editor’s Companion I mentioned my favorite comma error, which was along the same lines: an ad in a church bulletin for a supper hosted by the youth group read, “Don’t cook Mom!” Of course not! Moms, like revenge, are best served cold. Actually, the intent of the ad was that people should attend the supper and that Mom should not cook that night. “Don’t cook, Mom!” would have communicated that.

The “Eat Clean” ad has a bonus punctuation error: thing’s with that apostrophe is either a contraction for thing is (as in “That thing’s wrong”) or a possessive, indicating something belonging to the thing (as in “That thing’s punctuation is messed up”). A simple plural, such as more than one thing, does not usually get an apostrophe in English. It should just be things.

Watch those commas and apostrophes, bro!

More nutty news illustrations

Impossible voyage: the tanker was a ship. Maybe it couldn’t fit under that bridge.

A picture of Italy? Maybe those are the leaning towers of Petronas.

No, the Petronas Towers are in Melbourne, Australia—or someplace that starts with an M. Maybe Malaysia?

Bear attacks: Mr. hiker, could you pick that attacking animal out of a lineup?

UN appeals: Are these Gaza school buses that need to be repaired?

Come on, agency! These pets are waiting for an explanation!

An editor should check illustrations to make sure they match the content, but I don’t think an editor would have been needed to spot such gross mismatches, except maybe the Petronas Towers, which were famous as the tallest buildings in the world from 1998 to 2004 (they are in Malaysia, not Italy or Australia).

Legend doesn’t have it

This graph accompanying a news story on the website of WTOP radio, Washington, DC, lacks something: it has colored lines representing reported cases of Covid-19 in Washington, Maryland, and Virginia, but it doesn’t say which colors are associated with the District of Columbia and the two states. The colored lines from top to bottom probably don’t match the list from left to right in the headline, because Washington has a much smaller population than either Maryland or Virginia. My guess is that the blue is Virginia, because it has a much bigger population than Maryland or Washington, that the orange is Maryland, and that the red is Washington. But don’t leave readers guessing. Editors need to check graphics to make sure that the graphics provide information clearly.

Pets and school buses illustrate news confusion

Why is that group of pets illustrating a headline about tortoise movers? And are they the officials who identified a cougar? Or is one of those cats a cougar? And are they accusing the former teacher? Or are the cats his former victims?

And nothing says college like a row of school buses.

WTOP is, as the name suggests, the top news radio station in Washington, DC. I’ve listened to it many times, and I check the news on the WTOP website just about every day. But the website has some odd choices for illustrating its news. Are these choices made by a human being or by a computer? If it’s a computer, computers still need supervision. That’s where an editor can help and ask the tough questions spelled out above.

What Day Is This Anyway?

Virginia Railway Express sent out these Sunday alerts a few weeks in a row. The problem? VRE doesn’t run on Sunday.

The Weather Channel spread an alert about possible snow on a Monday, with the alert expiring Sunday afternoon.

Maybe Sunday is a bad time for composing, editing, and sending out alerts. Before you send a message out to the world, it’s important to read what you have written and see whether it is correct. It’s distressing to see how many people do not do this.