#188

So few words, so many errors

The i bills itself as a ‘quality’ paper, so this stuff is not good enough. Both cuttings are from August 18, 2017, and I haven’t even got past Page 3.

In this heading, you can either have ‘$510m awaits one very lucky winner’ or ‘$510m waits for one very lucky winner’, but not ‘awaits for’. ‘Rollover’ is a noun. If you use it as a verb it is two words, as in ‘Roll over Beethoven’. I didn’t underline this, but it is not the ‘game’ which is rolling over, but the ‘prize’. Opinions vary about split infinitives but this one is unnecessary because ‘either’ is superfluous. I would insert ‘in’ before ‘one’ in the last sentence. A dollar amount should always be converted into sterling, and if the winner takes the lump sum, why is it less than the jackpot mentioned at the start of the story?

The possessive of ‘it’ is ‘its’, as with ‘hers’ or ‘theirs’. It is illiterate to add an apostrophe. ‘It’s’ is the short form of ‘it is’ and is correct in the second reference, but I think it is too informal for a news story. ‘Ongoing’ is horrible and unnecessary in this context. The stray comma in the last line suggests that not the slightest care has been taken to check the copy through. If I were the editor of the i, I would be most unhappy.

 

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