Of infrastractures, justice services, citizens turnup to vote

What you need to know:

  • Customers don’t pick up your paper for free at the newsvendor’s, so you cannot blame them for being harsh when we make inexcusable mistakes.

Writing in any language is challenging, which is why it requires a good amount of care, and this need increases when you are doing it for public consumption.

Readers become thoroughly disappointed when they note mistakes that appear in newspapers, for they don’t expect that from us. Unfair to us? No; they aren’t being unfair, for everybody out there has traditionally looked at us as persons from whom they learn how to use language properly.

If you write in bad English or Kiswahili, readers are bound to wonder what business you have occupying a chair in a newsroom! It is human to err, of course. Typing errors—typo in newsroom lingo), misspelling or skipping words without which a sentence becomes incomplete/illogical, etc, are our Nemesis.

Between you and your God, such goofing is easily excusable, but your readers are “something else”.

Customers don’t pick up your paper for free at the newsvendor’s, so you cannot blame them for being harsh when we make inexcusable mistakes.

Yes, mistakes that make readers question your competence in basic literacy. Why does a whole scribbler complete a sentence, avoid putting a full stop, then starts a new one? Why do you write an interrogative sentence which you end with a full stop instead of a question mark?

How do you write, “Although…but?” What will the reader think of you when you write this: “ACCORDING to the RPC, he SAID…?”

We read the following in arguably Bongo’s No 1 Kiswahili newspaper (October 24 edition) “Kwa MUJIBU wa Mr Misifa, ANASEMA amerekodi zaidi ya nyimbo 500” (Translated as, “ACCORDING to Mr Misifa, HE SAID he has recorded more than 500 songs).

An oversight, you say? No, it is not, because our colleague writes in the same fashion in the subsequent paragraph: “Kwa MUJIBU wake, Dully ALISEMA…”

In the same article, the scribbler writes “bongo” instead of Bongo and “kiswahili” instead Kiswahili.

That proper nouns (e.g. names of persons, countries, cities, etc) must start with a capital letter is so basic that even our children in Class 3 follow this rule. Now why should a whole scribbler who is, at least, a Form 4 leaver and holder of some college certificate in media studies, jot down proper nouns starting with a lower case?

We note with disdain such display of illiteracy in virtually all social media groups we belong to! Practice makes perfect, so goes the adage. You entertain such recklessness in your social media communication and you end up “perfecting it” in your mainstream undertakings.

Enough lecturing. Let us now move on and share gems picked up from recent editions of the Bongo press. So, here we go…

On Page 4 of the Friday, October 29 edition of the tabloid associated with this columnist, there is a story entitled, ‘Contenders for the top office exude hopes of winning’. Therein, the scribbler purports to quote one presidential contender as saying: “…I congratulate Tanzanians for this important day. My call is for them is to TURNUP and vote for candidates of their choice.”

To turnup? Nope! If you are talking about arriving at a place, like, when you are invited to a meeting, you TURN UP (two words) on time.

If you write that as one word (with a hyphen—turn-up—it means something else. Check it out!

Back to the Saturday, October 17 edition of Bongo’s senior-most broadsheet, in which we have this headline, ‘Judiciary builds INFRASTRUCTURES to facilitate justice dispensation’. Infrastructures? No siree, because this noun, which refers to basic systems and services that are necessary for a country or an organisation, never carries the suffix “s” even when you have in mind several types of the same.

The intro reads: “The Judiciary is implanting various construction and rehabilitation projections…to create enabling environment for timely delivery of justice SERVICES.”

The word “services” here is superfluous—why not just say “delivery of JUSTICE”?

Ah, this treacherous language called English!