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Saturday, Sep. 05, 2009

Tom Frazier: Sun-Star -- 'Typo City' or not?

Two items are high on the list of reader complaints: errors and noncoverage of community events.

The biggest complaint I receive is the number of misspelled words or other typographical errors in the paper.

Even my daughter, who is an excellent writer, claims they "jump out" at her every time she picks up the paper. I must admit that I'm not so perceptive; for some reason, I just read the right words instead of what's actually in print.

So, I decided to put her and the Sun-Star to the test. For an entire week, she proofread for me and provided her findings.

We both learned a lot. I learned that she does, indeed, spot a lot of glitches I gloss over. She learned that English may be changing over time.

For example, she found quite a few problems with hyphens. But she doesn't have a copy of the AP Stylebook, which says rules for hyphens are "far from standardized" but also, "the fewer hyphens the better."

The result is that only two words on her list didn't pass muster: nextdoor and reoffense.

Others that she found were fine as used: yearlong, rockfall and preregister.

Then there's poor Arnold and his hyphen problem. Yes, that Arnold -- our Governator. This must be a Sun-Star system software problem.

Schwarzenegger is so long that it often needs a line break. When it does, it's perfectly fine to use a hyphen to separate the two halves. But if something changes so that it reverts to one line, the hyphen isn't always removed.

So you get:"Schwarze-negger" or "Schwarzeneg-ger." Poor Arnold.

Sometimes her findings were humorous, like the person with a heavy bandaged arm. (I wonder what they make heavy bandages from.)

Or wine flu -- doesn't sound that bad to me.

Sometimes a single small word was missing -- they "participated an assembly" instead of "participated in an assembly."

Did you know cars have gas peddles? (That same story misspelled the same person's name in two different ways.)

Executive Editor Mike Tharp says bad headlines "drive him insane." Good news this week. Mike: my daughter only caught one -- someone was offering "Layway" instead of "Layaway." Guess they were trying to make up for the week prior when "Mal-Mart" went back to the planners.

Then there are the ones where the sentence would be hard to diagram, "As the animal control officer said, who found the Dumpster dog said."

And what makes that Dumpster so special that it should be capitalized anyway?

Finally, I have to apologize to my daughter as I forgot to tell her I was looking only at Sun-Star writers.

Her list included some AP stories and even George Will, a national columnist. I'm not going there.

I'm not sure I answered the question of whether the readers are justified in thinking the Sun-Star is careless. Some will probably think so, others may not. Another group may think there are more uncaught errors than reported.

A final group may think it really doesn't matter. After all, "Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Amzanig huh?"

(Thanks to Google for uncovering that.)

The other big complaint, coverage for events, has a possible solution in the works.

That solution is very simple -- let the social clubs take the lead.

There is a new link that is designed to collect data about our clubs and their events.

It's a simple online form that should take just a few minutes to complete. All social clubs are encouraged to use it starting now.

The link is: /www.mercedsunstar.com/socialclubs/

Tom Frazier writes Sun Dog and can be reached at sundog@promessage.com.