Grammer? :)

Yes, there's an awful lot of bad spelling, haphazard punctuation, and so on. The Financial Standard treated us to 'The boy who often got into trouble with his father for not tacking in his shirt' in an article about the CBK governor. It also claimed that 'The sale of the Grand Regency Hotel bloated the otherwise good work by the governor.....'

But two points: Victor is right that ICT may be part of the problem - in particular the mobile phone. SMS English has become pervasive, and you regularly find graduates who literally can't string a sentence together anymore. I receive internship applications in SMS English.

Also, hiring unemployed graduates isn't the solution: proofreading, editing, subbing isn't something that you just know how to do even if you have an English degree.

Figuring out how to use spellcheck isn't very difficult. But many people just don't use it because, I suspect, they don't see the value in it anymore. Also, spellcheck won't fish out everything: sparking and sparkling are both proper words. Except there's nothing that sparkles a riot.

And then there's the school system - remember the 'misclennous' expenses listed by the striking teachers? Or the many, many typos on the Elimuportal.net?

Yes, it's a topic I'm a bit obsessed with: http://the-star.co.ke/business/andrea-bohnstedt/36970-when-english-becomes-greek

.

On 4 October 2011 23:29, Victor Bwire <victor@article19.org> wrote:
Infact it is the ICT use that is the cause of the problem- given the little ICT literacy by some of our newsrooms- most of our sub editors learn computer by on job-rarely able to master command of the computer functions- including grammer, spell checks-it will continue happening



Previously, we used to print hard copies of the articles for editing manually with red pens- thus very few mistakes- but now

Many of journalism courses do not include introduction to computer lessons- so how will the graduates know how to use them



Who regulates journalism training or draws the course or approves the same in the country anyway- if you even happen to see some course outlines offered in some of the colleges and universities offering journalism  including Government ones- you will feel sorry





________________________________
From: kictanet-bounces+victor=article19.org@lists.kictanet.or.ke [kictanet-bounces+victor=article19.org@lists.kictanet.or.ke] on behalf of james ratemo [jratemo@gmail.com]
Sent: 04 October 2011 21:16
To: Victor Bwire
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Declining English grammar in our Newsprint

Bwana PS what are you insinuating? We open our newsrooms fro the so called English majors? Some of them are in the newsrooms already...maybe they are sleeping on the job...my opinion

On Tue, Oct 4, 2011 at 11:11 PM, <bitange@jambo.co.ke<mailto:bitange@jambo.co.ke>> wrote:
All of today's newspapers had several grammatical errors.  At this time and age of ICT, is it not too embarrasing to have such errors?  We have  thousands of English majors without jobs.  It is time for media to be thorough in what they do by utilizing our many graduates without jobs.  As a Kenyan I get embarrased to see such errors.

Ndemo.




Sent from my BlackBerry®

-----Original Message-----
From: Grace Githaiga <ggithaiga@hotmail.com<mailto:ggithaiga@hotmail.com>>
Sender: kictanet-bounces+bitange=jambo.co.ke@lists.kictanet.or.ke<mailto:jambo.co.ke@lists.kictanet.or.ke>
Date: Sun, 2 Oct 2011 13:32:57
To: <bitange@jambo.co.ke<mailto:bitange@jambo.co.ke>>
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions<kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke<mailto:kictanet@lists.kictanet.or.ke>>
Subject: [kictanet] GSMA: Calls will remain high between African countries

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