CAVEAT: What follows for me refers to news, editorials, ads, and suchlike, not private correspondence or posts. Some people just have trouble with writing, and I get that. No problem. Ads and journalism, however, are quite another matter.
benhall.1 wrote:
Does anyone else have this "brain quirk"? It's starting to get annoying ...
Not to such a debilitating degree as you report, but...
kkrell wrote:
When viewing such material, I will "consider the source", which has now been tainted upfront. I mean, they start off by essentially telling me they're stupid, but expect me to listen to what they have to say next.
That's where I'm at. I'm capable of reading further, but at that point it's abundantly clear that the writer is only interested in glibly shoveling out product. In standard journalism I regard good English - not stilted;
good - to be not only a mark of respect toward the reader, but also a mark of the writer's self-respect, so without that I can only conclude that the writer doesn't take me or the message seriously. And sorry, buddy, but that counts.
Years back, journalism and advertisement were reliable sources of good grammar, spelling, and usage in English letters if ever you needed quick examples from the street; indeed, I always thought of journalism as the vanguard of good English usage in daily practice. No longer. It might be argued nowadays that the message is more important than the wrapping, or that the wrapping makes the message more accessible because flaws make it more "populist", but I see these as cynical and facetious excuses for laziness and disinterest in the reader.
Sometimes it's just plain incurious ignorance. Lately my pet peeve is the use of "hone in on" for "home in on". Jumping on that defective bandwagon doesn't make it more okay, because both "hone" and "home" are simple English words with very different meanings last time I looked. "Hone in on" doesn't even make any grammatical sense, if you bother to spend the couple of minutes it takes online to find out why.