Participants from 26 ‘international’ countries arrive
Need we say it again? That being mindful of basics is the cornerstone of good writing? More so, if you’re hired to use your pen to inform, educate and entertain people out there? We believe we need to.
A scribbler, we reiterate, must always strive to make life less difficult for his gatekeeper (subeditor in media lingo) by taking care of basic things like correct use of caps, punctuation and etiquette.
We read an interesting article recently, in which a scribbler penned the pronoun for God as “he” instead “He”! The name of God, even at the level of pronoun, must start with a capital. He’s Him, not him; He, not he!
And now, let’s move to our main duty here, that is, sharing gems picked up from recent editions of the Bongo English press, so here we go…
On Page 17 of the tabloid associated with this columnist (Mar 29 edition), there’s a piece entitled, ‘Rains have come and the mad man is drowning’, the scribbler says in Para 2:
“I note through carefully watching the clouds that there is going to be a HEAVY downpour.” What! A heavy downpour? No, we’ll say it for the zillionth time in this space. Contrary to what many East African scribblers would want their readers to believe, you’re guilty of entertaining tautological hopelessness when you qualify the noun “downpour” with the adjective “heavy” to show the rain is too much. Why, downpour, in itself, means heavy rainfall.
On Page 2 of the Mar 30 edition of Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet, there’s this story, ‘Norway University to boost visually impaired learning,” and therein the scribbler writes in the last para but-one:
“The project which runs from April 2017 to July 2021 at “a” tune of “2m/- pounds is being piloted by the Tengeru-based college.”
There’re three goofs here. One, when using “tune of” to mean a large amount of money, we use the definite article—“the”. Two, the preposition that precedes it must be “to”, not “at”. Three, the slash (/) is the shilling mark, which means that in his sentence, our colleague is talking about “shillings two million pounds”! That’s nonsensical, of course, so let’s offer a rewrite and redeem the sentence:
“The project which runs from April 2017 to July 2021 TO THE tune of “2m pounds” is being piloted by….”
In the same edition of the broadsheet, there’s a story headlined, ‘Reforms recommended for African economic integration’. This was a story on the meeting that took place in Kigali recently, attracting business leaders, policy makers and investors from across the world, who the scribbler describes thus:
“The participants came from 43 African countries and 26 INTERNATIONAL countries.” Duh! What are “international countries”? Could they be something different from, say LOCAL countries, in case there’s anything like that? Well, to us it doesn’t click, so, we would like to assume the scribbler set out to say something like, “The participants came from 43 African and 26 non-African countries.”
Ah, this treacherous language called English!
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