MMeM, Vol.13 Issue 4 – Writing aren’t hard

Nobody reads anymore, at all. I’ve said it time and time again, and well, it’s true. No one reads anything longer than 4 words. If something’s NOT in bullet-list format? Forgetta-bout it. It’s all due to technology to be sure.

We live in a touchscreen, visual, virtual, world today. Those non-readers I get. I can understand that, and almost expect it. It’s the non-reading proofreaders that I just don’t understand. If you are writing a story, an update, or a news release for a major newspaper or news outlet, isn’t it expected that you can spell and write grammatically correct? Apparently, not so much because NO ONE is doing that anymore. PERIOD.

Hey, I’ll be the first to admit that I make mistakes. Re-reading something you’ve written can be a BEATING. But, I DON’T GET PAID to do this. It’s not my profession, to be a snarky social commenter. I used to slightly understand the spell-check grammatical error misses. But, even those should be all but eliminated as spell-check programs are so much better today and do, in fact, check for grammar in most cases. Sure, there will be some exceptions, but then there are still typos that even one click of the most basic spell-checking software program would catch. So, why isn’t a newspaper using spell-check, or a proofreader?

“Financially strugging…” Spell check should have caught that. Strugging, is not a word. I checked, and it’s got a red squiggly line under it as I type this RIGHT now!

So, “Winner are indicated here with an asterisk (*)”. Now, this is a case when relying on spell-check would get you into trouble. But, if you take this phrase and try it in MS Word for example, you’ll get that trusty green squiggly line under are as expected telling the writer to use WINNERS.

This isn’t that complicated right?