Can't read it wrong

[Nanohedron]

My concern is that what you wrote makes sense.

Damn, I forgot that we hit 1984 a while back.

The original does not. Your sense may not be correct.

Well, I'll just repeat myself and leave it at that: it was the only sense I could make of it. If you have alternatives we should explore them, because I would rather have my mind opened.

[kkrell]

Looks like the BBC cannot even get a paragraph right.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37265912

Article in its entirety (has an accompanying video).

"Illustrator Quentin Blake on 'new' Beatrix Potter tale

3 September 2016 Last updated at 09:30 BST

Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck and Mrs Tiggywinkle are just some of Beatrix Potter's most beloved creations... Now a newly-discovered character is making its to the bookshelf - The Tale of Kitty in Boots.

The story was written more than a 100 years ago, and has been brought to life by illustrator Quentin Blake.

Holly Hamilton reports."

Apparently, Holl does not report well.

"Now a newly-discovered character is making its"
Its what?

[Nanohedron]

"Now a newly-discovered character is making its to the bookshelf..."

I see two possibilities: "making it to the bookshelf", or "making its way to the bookshelf". Either would do; while they are stylistically different, neither has a meaning that trumps the other in absolute terms. I lean toward the former, but who knows what the writer had in mind.

[benhall.1]

"Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddleduck and Mrs Tiggywinkle are just some of Beatrix Potter's most beloved creations... Now a newly-discovered character is making its to the bookshelf - The Tale of Kitty in Boots.

The story was written more than a 100 years ago, and has been brought to life by illustrator Quentin Blake.

Holly Hamilton reports."

Apparently, Holl does not report well.

"Now a newly-discovered character is making its"
Its what?

The thing is, there's much more wrong with it than that. Let us suppose for a moment that what was meant was "making its way". Then we have this:

"Now a newly-discovered character is making its way to the bookshelf - The Tale of Kitty in Boots."

But that makes no sense at all. "The Tale of Kitty in Boots" cannot possibly be a character; presumably it is the name of the book.

[Nanohedron]

The standalone "its" did a good job in diverting my attention from that. I remember it not sitting well, but I just thought it was somehow clumsier than it needed to be and for the moment thought no more of it. I like to think I would have caught it eventually.

[Nanohedron]

I have all of these pet peeves and more. My latest annoyance is, for example, "setup" vs. "set up."
"Setup" being a noun and "set up" being a verb + adverb. Seems obvious to me, but I still see people saying things like "I need to setup my computer."
Hangout, workout, and similar words seem to be causing the same problem.

Saw this today in a news article:

“It just breaks my heart because so many people have grownup around that rock,” David Kalas, who took the video of the rock being pushed over, said.

[Nanohedron]

From the Washington Post:

Want to blow up things in space? Here’s an app that let’s you do it.

[benhall.1]

From the Washington Post:

Want to blow up things in space? Here’s an app that let’s you do it.

The Washington Post??!!?!?!!! We're doomed ...

[Nanohedron]

My thoughts exactly.

[s1m0n]

The apostrophe has long been the least stable grapheme in the English language. Lots of people have no idea what to do with one, and deploy it more or less at random. In an age in which spell checkers do for editors and stuff gets published straight to the web, that's makes for a lot of errors.

Which, I suppose, won't be errors in another generation. Correct spelling and grammar is whatever most people agree on, not what last generation agreed on.

[Nanohedron]

...that's makes for a lot of errors.

Yes, I suppose it does.

Of course change is inevitable, sooner or later. The biggest misgiving I have with what's going on now is that the system as I learned it at least laid claim to a certain reasoning behind the forms that everyone calls "rules". Despite its occasionally undeniable flakiness, this reasoning was nevertheless an anchor for me, a great and frankly liberating help in the learning process. Others seem to have found the anchor only burdensome, and now we have the result in the publications we read. The irony is that for as much as they've wanted to be, these writers are still not free of the rules. They never were. To this day the literate reader still expects good professional writing and judges the writer accordingly; the sciences and technology demand it, and there is no need to explain why. Our language hasn't transformed enough to be free of rules and still be coherent. If this is transformation, the horizon only looks rocky. Someone will always make the too-easy assertion that published semiliteracy and fuzziness are simply evidence of language evolution. That doesn't cut it for me. How would you like your reading? I prefer it clear as a bell.

Institutionalised randomisation can never lay claim to any reasoning behind it, nor can it help those who try to learn the language, or keep them from falling into ignorance while they do.

[benhall.1]

Correct spelling and grammar is whatever most people agree on, not what last generation agreed on.

Yes, I understand the principle behind this. However, one of the things that is most upsetting about the horrendous use of English nowadays, including the misuse of apostrophes, is that what is written no longer makes sense. I suppose I'm saying the same as Nano, in a different way. But the ambiguity of a lot of sloppy writing these days leaves me often completely at a loss as to what the writer may have meant.

[david_h]

Is part of the reason that much of the 'writing' many people now do is typing that follows conventions more like those of conversational, rather than written, language? Both grammatically and in the way in which the context is maintained by the exchange of relatively short utterances rather than a sequence of sentences from the same person. For example on Facebook a comment that runs to more than one sentence almost seems like a breach of etiquette. So people get out of practice at writing formally, or get into bad habits.

Also, whilst being able to cut and paste is a great way of re-structuring text for clarity, or brevity if working to a word limit, it is also a way of screwing up the grammar or logic without noticing. An editor that my (scientific/technical) writing used to go through said he sometimes longed for a return to manual typewriters and white-out as an aid to focusing the mind - so long as he didn't have to use one.

[Nanohedron]

Why Russia might become a super power again?

Headline writing from MSN. Definitely bad.

Is part of the reason that much of the 'writing' many people now do is typing that follows conventions more like those of conversational, rather than written, language?

I think so. I also think it's normal. I don't have any problem with that in general - each of us does the best we can - but publications are a different matter.

Here's another headline today from MSN:

Why some people in California are straight up not showering

They seem to preface with "why" a lot, these MSN people.

With a nod to s1m0n's comment about grammar, you might be surprised to learn that I don't have too much problem with the above, given the decidedly relaxed climate of the news source. The headline's folksiness makes me imagine the reader in a robe and bunny slippers with a cuppa hot joe and dread for the day to come, as do many of MSN's offerings. Now given the sentence structure, I would have preferred to see a hyphen in this case: "straight-up" - but it wasn't my call.

Still, hyphenated or no, would I have written "straight up"? Nope. This is a matter of personal style in its context. Is it bad copy? I leave that up to you.

[benhall.1]

Is part of the reason that much of the 'writing' many people now do is typing that follows conventions more like those of conversational, rather than written, language?

I think so. I also think it's normal. I don't have any problem with that in general - each of us does the best we can - but publications are a different matter.

Yes, absolutely. I never - or very rarely - seem to have any problem with reading all sorts of styles of English, whether they contain mistakes or not (my English frequently does) on forums such as this one. Then again, the sorts of mistakes I'm talking about seem to occur mainly when people are self-consciously trying to write like journalists - at least, that's how it looks to me. And that tends to happen in a journalistic context of one sort or another. And then it all goes ... um ... we'll call it pear-shaped.