Thursday 28 February 2008

"Children's mag's damage writing"

"Lightweight fiction and magazines could be damaging children's ability to write good [sic] English, a government report says."

Politely ignoring the rather clumsy English of that sentence, AFAICS, the standard of English used in today's comics and magazines is no lower than it was thirty years ago. Moving swiftly on ...

"And there were claims that the language of texting and e-mailing was being used when a more formal style was required.".

Right! They just started a sentence with 'and'. Further, the languages used for texting and e-mailing are completely different, FFS, so that should be plural and not singular.

Compare and contrast: "Goblin King, just f*** off and die!"(appropriate for an e-mail) with "GBLNKG FKFF&DIE" (more typical of a 'text').

Completely different, as any fule kno.

5 comments:

Longrider said...

Actually, there's nothing wrong with starting a sentence with a preposition. It's been accepted in modern usage for some while - I use it a fair bit myself. I had a falling our once with a colleague who insisted that it was wrong. Grammatically, perhaps, but style wise, it's okay.

Anonymous said...

Come on nobody likes a smartybum
But just for fun look at the writing style in some blogs. Rather arcane at times
- u no.

Mark Wadsworth said...

And your point is?

Anonymous said...

Mark, why are the "mag's" of the title possessive?

With a quick "Bwaahaha", the evil pedant scampers back under the floorboards.

In total agreement about comics and magazines. The notion that kids reading is undermining literacy is akin to arguing one should only sprint, never jog. The choice for most kids is between reading a comic and not reading, rather than between comics and Dickens.

Mark Wadsworth said...

'Mag's" is short for "Magazines", the BBC got that one wrong as well.