Children Might Read This

The dangers of writing the way we speak are all too evident in yesterday's edition.

-------------- What’s going on at Sun-Herald.com

It's not the same, but useful
Ok, click on the Community Calendar link and you’ll see something different from what you used to see. It’s a new calendar that will help our users. This calendar allows users to look at calendars by category, by town, by date and the items can be e-mailed to friends or to you to remind it is coming up. And if you want to put an item on there, click on Submit Event, and that will be posted, too. Of course, that item will go through an editor and with the anticipation of what we will get, please wait 4-8 business days before the item is posted.

I know things are tight over there, but readers deserve a little copy editing and proofreading for their 25 cents. The gem, by the way, appeared yesterday in a box postioned over the boilerplate brag "Pulitzer Prize Finalist 2005."

Read All About My Pet Peeve

It's nice the newspaper learned it wasn't eliminated in the first round of judging for the 2005 PP. I read the entry. It is a two-parter, published Dec. 30 and Dec. 31, 2004, detailing the struggle of staffers to get out the news in the days after Hurricane Charley, four-plus months earlier. Despite the time lag between the event and the story's publication on the last two days of the year, the story was full of typos, confusing time references, and a bunch of other terrible writing. As in today's gripe, it needed editing.

I'm guessing PP judges have an unofficial soft spot in their hearts for The Big Storm Story: How My Little Newspaper Made It Into Every Subscriber's Driveway.

Give it up, Eds. It's been three years and counting; the runner-up in a beauty contest is famous for about a week -- in her family circle.