November 03, 2010
In which I nitpick
I love writing. I have always loved writing and I assume I always will. Anything that is well written makes me happy, from Paradise Lost through to the menu at a greasy spoon. Poor writing is one of the reasons that I stopped reading newspapers, that and that the fact that newspapers are all pushing some odious agenda, but mainly the poor writing. Monkeys flinging their journalism 2:2 at the unfortunate keyboard.
One source of news I do read is the BBC website. It's clean and simple to read and I read it to become aware of facts and not for artistic merit. I do however, have my limits. Reading through the sports headlines I came across the following:
"Manchester United's 3-0 Champions League win over Bursaspor came at a cost because winger Nani and midfielder Darren Fletcher both suffered injuries."
That is the sentence of a six year old. It is one step away from writing: "I watched the football match it was nice I had fun".
I know sports journalism is where stupid people and failed sportsmen go to die, a miasma of tired cliche and and neglect, but if the BBC can't get through the headlines without using the words 'nice', 'lots' and 'because' then I'm just going to start getting my two year old daughter to write up match reports for me and immerse myself in the comparative depth.
3 Comments:
thelynchmob1 posted on November 03, 2010 at 22:30 PM
When I was in English class in about year 10, we had to do a mock match report that we had to make up. At the time my teacher said that mine was fantastic and wouldn't look out of place in a national newspaper. Thinking about it in light of what you said, that seems like much less of a compliment. :(
kerwinty posted on February 07, 2012 at 06:28 AM
Don't know if you are into sports or pop culture from the states, but a site called www.grantland.com has some of the best writing around. Their staff cover a very wide range of subjects, and the founder, Bill Simmons is brillant imo.
zooroaster posted on June 28, 2012 at 22:53 PM
There's one thing that irks me and a lot of my sports friends...after some sort of collision either by sporting object or players on the field, you can almost always hear a commentator say, "That was a near miss". Obviously, the collision never happened thus a near hit.
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