On the illiteracy of journalists

I mean the word illiterate to carry a technical rather than an opprobrious sense here. Add whatever opprobrium you feel is fitting, yourself. I am not talking about the gutter press. I have always flinched at anything that shouts at me typographically, and my consequent ignorance precludes further comment. No, I am talking of the so-called quality press, whose pages I have read at home and in waiting rooms. Homophonic errors (their/there, bare/bear, prize/prise, Rambo/Rimbaud) appear so frequently that I am led to believe either that a deal of copy is transmitted by telephone to an editor whose mind is elsewhere or that the creators of the copy are still at that preliterate stage in which what is written is thought to be simply a transcription of what is spoken. The common error of punctuation that confuses a full stop (.) with a pause (--) is further evidence in favour of the second hypothesis. She stopped him. Dead. How woefully often does one come across what appears at first reading to be a sentence without a verb, but which one later realises to be a misguided attempt to express in text an emphatic pause! Has it not occurred to these journalists, or was it not pointed out at school, that speech and the written word are different media? There cannot be many readers nowadays who can only, like the monks of mediaeval times, read aloud. Rhetorical devices intended for speech should have little place in text. It is true that in speech we use breaths and pauses (often very minute ones) to help the hearer parse the sentence; however, written text relies on punctuation for this, and the connection between punctuation and how a sentence is read aloud is vestigial. Indeed, there is no reason why the spoken language and the written should bear any relationship with each other at all. Anyone can tell from a tape or radio whether they are listening to spontaneous speech or to written text being read aloud. The two are simply not the same. The rules of punctuation are there to help the reader parse the text, as a first step to comprehending it. Spaces and punctuation signs separate words. Full stops terminate sentences. FULLSTOPSTERMINATESENTENCES If you have ever tried to decipher text without spaces or punctuation signs you will appreciate all the more what convenient inventions they are. There was a time when even the direction of the text, left to right, right to left, up or down, was left to individual choice. SECNETNESETANIMRETSPOTSLLUF It does not matter what the actual signs are, but it does matter that everybody agree on their rules of use. Journalists illiterate - Ranter This illiteracy, by which I mean the fallacy of confusing text with speech, has nothing to do with journalese which I see as a perfectly reasonable use of abbreviation and agglutination to express headlines as compactly as possible.