LookAlert

How did these things ever get published? For more tips on (journalism) Style Matters, follow this link.

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TEACHABLE MOMENT: The reality is that cricketer David Warner is just 170cm (barely 5’7”) and Australian women’s cricket captain Ellyse Perry is 176cm (well over 5’9”). Yet this national newspaper chose to photographically demote the country’s three-times top female cricketer and elevate a talented batsman coming back from a 12-month suspension for ball-tampering. (Both took out top honours at cricket’s annual prestigious awards night.)

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LOOK ALERT: This error is unlikely to have been caused by auto-correct, perhaps slipping through because of an over-reliance on spell-check but it is definitely a proof-reading failure.

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LOOK ALERT: Because it’s so easy to be distracted when you are in a hurry, it always pays to re-read what you have typed to pick up any missing or incorrect words. Read the above quote and see if you can suggest a solution.

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LOOK ALERT: The use of the (usually male) adjective “debonair” is jarring in this home page blurb and possibly not what the editor has intended. The Oxford Dictionary defines the word as “(of a man) confident, stylish and charming”.

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LOOK ALERT: It’s so easy to overlook the little things, but perhaps the writer of this blurb does not understand which is the correct indirect article (a or an) to use. Let the way the sentence is spoken help you. It’s “an eight million dollar investment” because the dollar amount starts with a vowel.

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LOOK ALERT: There is no crime in reporting the truth. Period.

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LOOK ALERT: There is an increasingly annoying tendency with news writers to spell words as they hear them, rather than use the correct spelling – and this probably happens because they are relying on a spell-checker to pick up their errors. This never works when the misspelled word is actually another word correctly spelled. After getting the rather complex first sentence above out cleanly, the writer has used “lead” instead of “led”. Not just a simple error, but another broken thread in the already tenuous trust relationship with readers, who can rightly wonder if the writer (and their publication) cannot get the little things correct, what else might not be accurate in their content. 

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LOOK ALERT: Who let this through? A lack of simple punctuation makes this sentence heavy going for readers. It needed to be clearer both in chronology and meaning. Even re-reading the sentence is a perplexing chore. An eagle-eyed sub-editor/news producer would have discussed with the writer her/his intent, counselled a more conservative legal approach and perhaps suggested something like: Barba was dismissed from the Cowboys for breach of contract – before playing a single game for the team – after reports emerged that he was being investigated by Townsville Police over an incident at Townsville Casino that was allegedly captured on CCTV.

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LOOK ALERT: This news item was referring to the death of a heavily pregnant New Zealand photographer who died suddenly. The problem here was that she was given a traditional Maori service, not a Mauri one. The distinction is important because the Mauri people hailed from the ancient African kingdom of Mauretania that included present-day northern Morocco plus western and central Algeria.

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LOOK ALERT: Apart from the demeaning term “girl power” used in the coloured slug and in the main text to refer to the State’s two adult female political leaders, this is another instance of a misplaced comma and a missing comma that would have helped the sentence meaning to be quickly understood. The sentence following the slug could have been better written: Queensland leads the nation with two women in its most senior political leadership roles and, to celebrate International Women’s Day, our highest-profile female leaders tell what it’s like to be shaping the modern world.

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LOOK ALERT: Had the writer used the personal pronoun “she” or “he”, then the verb “was” would be correct. However, as the writer used the non-gendered “they”, the verb needed to be “were”.

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TEACHABLE MOMENTS: Firstly, the second sentence in this series, a direct quote, opens with the usual double quotation mark. However, the word inside the quote that is emphasised should be encased in single quotation marks, not doubles. Secondly, as the speaker was introduced in the first sentence, the first directly quoted sentence should end with a phrase of attribution: “While we can be cynical about brands vying to be seen as ‘woke’, providing sponsorship money to enable hard work to be don is, at least theoretically, great,” Dr Rosewarne said. 

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LOOK ALERT: Now that is a shocking error, confusing “elective” with “electric”. Where was the proof-reading prior to publication?

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LOOK ALERT: There is a missing comma in this headline and its absence is problematic. It should be placed after the word “suspect”. Without it, the name at the top is meaningless and, frankly, redundant. With it, the man is described in three distinct words, and the remainder of the headline ascribed his action. Headlines usually do not have an “and” in them. Instead they use a comma where one would usually stand. 

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LOOK ALERT: Another example of an absence of proof-reading by the writer and anyone else who processed this copy before publication. It is such a small word, “of”, and it is just one letter from “on”, but that is no excuse for not picking up and correcting the error. 

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LOOK ALERT: Surely the online news producer checked this headline? Why was the obviously wrong word, “has”, not corrected with an active verb – such as “gives”? A change to a slightly longer word could also see the words repositioned throughout the rest of the headline into a more balanced array.

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LOOK ALERT: What’s the use of spelling a difficult name correctly and then not checking the very next word? Or was this an effort at speech-to-text, complete with a mispronunciation? Either way, the mistake should have been picked up before it was published.