Common Sense Journalism - Tumblr

More evidence of not getting this Internet thing? So my local McClatchy paper, The State, runs (in the paper) a page-sized chart of when local fish are available. Cool. Would love to save it, and on the online site, the paper is touting it. So click, download and print (handy to have a hard copy). Only - well, let me just invite you to download it yourself and try to print it so it fits a normal page - and see how legible it is.

Fortunately, there’s a link on the page to the S.C. Aquarium’s page on this — oops, link is not clickable.

At least the aquarium doesn’t have it’s digital head up its …

Go the trouble of cutting and pasting the link from the paper, click around and there’s the chart. Way to go, McClatchy!

This Sunday comic by Bill Amend illustrates perfectly the inanity of using “and/or.”

Or as the old illustration goes, so the police radio crackles that the suspect may be armed with a shotgun or a machine gun, and the order is to shoot to kill if seen. So if he comes out brandishing both, you’re holding fire?

(BTW, no knock on Amend here; that was perfect for the joke. The entire strip is used here only for educational purposes - the context of and/or would not be clear without it. Visit his site - buy his stuff. Really. Support comic strip artists. They make the day worthwhile.)

Oops, one of those common holiday errors. It’s Kriss Kringle.

From today’s The State newspaper in Columbia, S.C.

Headlines should reflect exactly what the story says.

Read the story closely. Was the ban “blocked”? In fact, was there any “ban” at all?

If there are any questions, start with the last graf and then read up four grafs to the one that begins “In fact, the new standards don’t ban incandescent bulbs …”

Found on a fence on 35th Street in Queens. Probably a good thing this resident doesn’t “bare” any.

This comes from a hackcollege graphic on students’ cellphone use. It’s interesting and worth a whole look. But sure would be nice had they been able to get the use of “everyday” right. It’s two words - every day - as an adverb as used here. One word as an adjective.