Greater care must be taken by the media to lessen errors

Apr 05, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
How can our children excel at English exams when they’re exposition to the language is of its poorest in the electronic media, especially on television?
Some of the most horrendous spellings of certain words can be seen every single day on the television and sometimes I wonder when it is going to end?
Media houses that have been in existence for quite some time are regularly guilty of allowing their employees or whoever prepares these graphic advertisements to crucify the English Language as it were.
Isn’t there anyone to check these type-written advertisements before they go on the air? In Berbice, the same nonsense is going on.

The guilty parties know who they are and yet continue with advertisements with incorrect spellings and missing punctuation marks too. Commas, full-stops, capital letters, colons, hyphens, semi-colons, among other markers, are not placed where they’re supposed to be placed. I used to work for a TV station a few years back as a control operator.
Part of my job entailed preparing these graphical advertisements. At the end of the day, someone would come in and check the grammar and spelling qualities of the advertisements prepared for that day.
I do not know if this still happens and in other media houses. But the question should be why should that happen?

Aren’t our TV stations employing persons who are competently qualified for this so-called ‘control operator’ job which entails typing graphical advertisements and death announcements to go on the air?
Editor, do you know that the requirement to get a job at these places nowadays is a mere Grade III in the English Language?
Then isn’t that a recipe for disaster that we are asking for? When we employ persons just out of high school, with Grade III passes in Math and English, it is another sad day for our country. These people should know that either they upgrade their grades or be left out of the job market. I know that sounds harsh but it is the right thing to do.

As the graphical advertisements and even death announcements show on the TV, and contain errors in spelling, grammar and punctuations, I quickly spot them and it really wrenches my heart — it does.
It also hurts when very largely written computer graphics (words) are spelt incorrectly and the people behind them don’t do anything about it.
It’s like some of these TV people don’t even watch what they are sending out to our homes.
Can you Editors say, too, what the quality is like of the letters you receive to publish? Proof readers are put to the task to glance through and spot the mistakes, right? I know some of my correspondences, though very, very rare, have spelling and punctuation errors.

Even the best make mistakes. I saw numerous spelling errors on CNN’s ‘news- bar’ in times past.
But we need to make extra effort that what we put out to the public is of the best quality. Of course, there might be a time when an error is made, but this is certainly not the case as many TV stations are habitually guilty of spelling and grammatical errors on the air. Programme guides, advertisements, death announcements, notices, vacancies, and the list goes on and on, are a few of the presentations which contain numerous errors.
We are not showing our children the way it should be spelt, written and laid out on the TV screen.
And yet we expect them to do better at CXC English Language?
If we are not certain of the spelling of a word, let us keep a reputable Oxford Dictionary at hand, or do like I do — Google the word.

The other day, I was challenged as to the existence of the words ‘enthused’ and ‘fierceful’ (even my computer has placed a ‘red line’ underneath ‘fierceful’) but I found out that they do exist and are part of the English Language.
Let us get familiar with the uses of the various punctuation marks and we can either take or retake a few courses in Grammar.
I would benefit us much for the pens, the pencils and now more than ever, those keyboards are all making mischief with our written language. Who to blame?
Leon Jameson Suseran

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