#181

The Times, August 11, 2017

So how tall is Mr Tankard? You need to know this to judge whether there is a real need for the couple to raise their roof by 5ft (2metres). The neighbours obviously don’t think there is. Mr Tankard should be asked to state his height and if he refuses to answer, then you say so.

#180

i newspaper, August 7, 2017

What a strange piece this is. Die Rot Punkte is an Australian comedy duo called Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias, who pretend to be German siblings. Yet this seems to treat them as genuine rock performers. Will every i reader know the act is a spoof? I doubt it. If you are doing a joke item you need to give more clues, otherwise the reader will simply be baffled. In any case, why is it so full of doubled words, misplaced apostrophes and mis-spelled words? Is this a joke too? It doesn’t amuse me much.

#179

The Times, August 7, 2017

This would be fine, except that Djokovic announced on July 26 that he would not play again for the rest of the season because of an elbow injury. I imagine the TV listings are supplied by an agency but there is no excuse for this. Someone should be checking.

#178

Sunday Times, August 6, 2017

This treats ‘marinade’ and ‘marinate’ as if they are interchangeable, which they are not. The ‘marinade’ (noun) is the liquid mixture in which you ‘marinate’ (verb) an item of food. So the first attempt, in the heading, is wrong: it should be ‘Marinated’ (verb). The second, in the intro, is right. The third, further down the intro, isĀ  wrong and should be ‘marinate’. The fourth, in the recipe, is right.

#177

The Times, August 5, 2017

You can’t mix imperial and metric measures in the same story. I expect the Times has a house style on which is preferred, and presumably this has not been followed. My guidance would be to choose one as your main measure and give the other in brackets, eg ‘the 33kg (55lb) concrete block’. Then be consistent in all your stories.

#176

i newspaper, August 2, 2017

Nelson, Lancashire, has a population of around 30,000, roughly the same size as Oxford. The person who handled this must not have heard of Nelson, because he or she would have known that it is a town, not a village. In that case you look it up. You cannot rely on the writer to get everything right. That is what subs are for. If you can’t be bothered to check something which you do not know to be correct, you really should be doing something else.

#175

World Championships 2017: Mo Farah defends his 10,000m title in London

BBC Sport Website, August 4, 2017

This is the heading on a story about Mo Farah winning his race. ‘Defend’ means ‘protect’, so it says only that he took part in the race. It should say that he ‘retains’ his title or ‘successfully defends’ it.

#174

i newspaper, August 4, 2017

You really need more geography than ‘Netherlands’. So what were the lamp posts (note: two words, not hyphenated) doing on his car? And the word ‘only’ is missing before ‘offences’. As it stands, this short is not worth using.

#173

Daily Express, August 2, 2017

This purports to be a quote from J B Morton, the legendary writer of the Express’s Beachcomber column for 50 years. I would be amazed if he was ignorant enough to put ‘Bosch’, which is the name of a German electrical goods firm and a 16th century Dutch artist, and a Second World War nickname for the Germans, instead of ‘Bosh’, meaning rubbish.

#173

i newspaper bumper edition

All these cuttings are from the paper dated August 3, 2017

‘Forward advance’ is a tautology, which means saying the same thing in different words. The definition of advance is to move forward. This writer liked it enough to use it twice.

The i prides itself on not making a fuss about royalty, but it should still get titles right. The former Sophie Rhys-Jones is the wife of the Earl of Wessex and as such she is a countess. A duchess is the wife of a duke, for example the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. Duke is a senior rank to earl.

Instead of the stuff about the cloth manufacturers of old, it would be more interesting to say that the building has been turned into shops, offices and cafes, and that the restoration took three years. You do not need the word ‘first’ before ‘opened’, because ‘opened’ means ‘first used’.

 

This is an example of a misused comma. It makes the word ‘who’ relate to the subject in the first part of the sentence, ie the son of the earl. Without the comma, the ‘who’ relates to the last-mentioned person, ie the earl. You should also lose the second comma. In the last paragraph a couple of words seem to be missing. Who was he ordered to pay? And should it be a ‘lump sum’?

How many medium, large or giant molecules are there? A molecule by definition is tiny.