Students blogging on politics

My Reporting Contemporary Issues students are covering Greeley City Council and the election. It should be an exciting semester. I don't think they're enamored with City Council yet, but then again, who is? They are blogging about Council already. Check out the blogs in the list to the right. On election night, each student will report live from a different venue. It should be fun. Check back in a couple of weeks for a look at what's happening in Greeley and surrounding areas on the big night.

Editing for the gold

I love the Olympics, but I can't stand the announcers. They use such bad language. Here are the most glaring examples I've come across so far in this year's games:

1. A record for stupidity. Olympic athletes set lots of records. World records. Olympic records. National records. The United States' women's 4x100-meter relay team broke a world record that had stood since 1985. But when the announcer said the women "set a new world record," he dropped the stick and lost any chance at a medal. According to Associated Press style, you cannot set a "new record"
because it's redundant. If you set a record, it's automatically new, right? I mean, you can't set an old record, can you? So when somebody sets a record, leave out the "new."

2. Height rhymes with might. The pole vault is always fun to watch. But when NBC held tryouts for announcers, somebody should have made them pronounce the word "height." The announcer pronounced it "hithe" (long i followed by a -th sound) over and over. The word is pronounced "hite" (rhymes with might). It's similar to "weight." Many people mispronounce it. They must be confusing it with "depth" and "width." You'd only pronounce it "hithe" if it were spelled "heighth." See the extra h?

3. A team is singular. For some reason, American TV networks like to use British announcers for soccer. They always make teams into plural nouns. They say "Japan are doing well" instead of "Japan is doing well." Japan is one team, so it's singular. Therefore, it takes a singular verb -- is. This is true even when you say "United States is." Even though "States" is plural, it's still one country. And I am  proud to say that the United States women's team is the gold medal winner in soccer.

Punctuation: Know your shit

New book looks at Native Americans in the media

A bit of shameless self-promotion. My chapter on the Native American mascot issue has been published in the new book American Indians in the Mass Media, by Meta G. Carstarphen and John P. Sanchez. My chapter looks at the issues that arise when an intramural basketball team called the Fighting Whites takes the media by storm. Read an article about the book in The Oklahoma Daily.

Reporters need to be editors now

The Denver Post is laying off up to two-thirds of its copy editors, according to Westword. In a memo to staff, editor Greg Moore says that much of the paper's copy editing will be done "at the content-generating level." That means reporters will need to  be proficient at copy editing.  As news and PR move more and more to the online-first model of delivery, all journalists must adapt. That means developing an eye for details like AP style, grammar, punctuation and spelling, as well as an eye for the bigger picture in terms of content, libel, ethics and structure. Another key is fact-checking. It seems like a lot of times, in the rush to get the copy online quickly, fact-checking is forgotten.  These are some of the reasons all news-editorial and PR/advertising students in our program take the News Editing and Layout class.

Ad makes ass out of headline

This is what happens when ads take over the front page of a newspaper. Read more.

Using active verbs

I recently read an interesting column on verbs by Constance Hale. It's a good read for anyone interested in a career in writing.

One thing I've noticed over the years is that good journalists use active verbs. I tell students to avoid what I refer to as "weak" verbs like "was" and "are." For instance, instead of saying "There are about 13,000 students who attend UNC," I would say "About 13,000 students attend UNC." The verb "there are" is boring. The verb "attend" is active.

Active verbs bring stories to life. Boring verbs bog stories down.

Students getting down to business

Students in my Advanced News and Feature Writing class are once again blogging on their beats. I have assigned the blog for a few years now. Besides teaching students how to blog, it gets them working on two important tasks. First, it gets them writing about their beat on a regular basis. Second, it allows them to reflect on their reporting and writing. Check out what they have to say by clicking the links at right.

Worst error ever?

If this copy editor didn't lose his or her job, I'll eat a newspaper.

Students blogging again

My Reporting Contemporary Issues students are creating blogs. They will cover Greeley City Council twice a month and write about what happens on their blogs. Tonight we went over the agenda for the last meeting, and nothing stood out as especially interesting. I hope they don't all drop the class after that.

Pictures, words and women

I taught the Mass Communication and Gender class this spring. It went really well. Students did some interesting projects and seemed to learn a lot. But when it comes to comm and gender, some people still have a lot to learn.

My son got a neat game for his sixth birthday. It's called "Guess Who," and he really enjoys playing it. I am troubled by it, though. The point of the game is to use guesses as clues to find out who your opponent is. The board features 24 faces. Five are female. This just doesn't seem right to me. About half the population is female. Children learn a lot by playing games. What are they to learn when only five out of 24 faces are female?

If you care about issues of fairness in communication, you should check out the writings of Kate Swift. Swift, who died in early May, did a lot of work on sexism in language. As she and her co-author Casey Miller wrote in Words and Women,

everything we read, heard on the radio and television, or worked on professionally confirmed our new awareness that the way English is used to make the simplest points can either acknowledge women’s full humanity or relegate the female half of the species to secondary status.

Swift and Casey called attention to some of the blatantly sexist phrases in English and helped change the way words were used. For instance, they pointed out that when women were talked about, they were usually talked about in terms of their looks. The use of "firefighter" instead of "fireman" can be traced to their work. Read the New York Times obituary.

Did you really make the finals?

More on quotation marks. They should only be used when QUOTING something. This means they should be used when you're using someone else's exact words.

The quotation marks on this trophy are unnecessary because nothing is being quoted. The quote marks actually make the trophy look stupid because they imply that the winner was not really a finalist. I guess it could be a trophy presented to someone who played a tennis player in a show.

My first podcast

I decided to enter the 21st century and recorded a podcast. Let me know if you think I should stick to print.

The media get their due

The semester is winding down, and the grading is heating up. I'm almost through with my second group of papers of the day. I've run across many errors, of course, but two stand out because they are so common.

The first is the misuse of the word "media." It's an important word for us journalists, and when students mess it up we tend to get angry. "No, no," you say. "The Cranky Copy Editor gets angry?" It's a fact. I do. On with our post.

The word media is plural. This seems to be a difficult concept for students to grasp, but it's true. Contrary to popular belief, the following is grammatically correct:

The media are quite influential.

Media is the plural form of "medium." So this is also correct:

My favorite medium is newspapers.

This is confusing because most English words are made plural by adding "s," and this is an exception. But it's one journalism and mass communications students should know.

The second error I've encountered a lot today is noun-pronoun disagreement. In English, pronouns must agree with the nouns they follow. For instance, in the following sentence, the pronoun does not agree with its noun:

A reporter needs to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

We're only talking about one reporter, so the word is singular. Therefore, the pronoun that follows should be "his or her," not "their." An easy way to fix this is to change "reporter" to "reporters," as in the following:

Reporters need to keep their opinions out of the stories they write.

I tend to suggest this change to avoid the cumbersome use of "his or her," as in the following:

A reporter needs to keep his or her opinions out of the stories he or she writes.

I tell my students to avoid the use of "he" when gender is not known because it's sexist. But that's a topic for another post. ...

Somebody call PETA!

Thanks to the Food Network for this one.

Order on the court

My university is hosting the Big Sky men's basketball tournament, so everyone in Greeley is very excited. The local paper, together with our campus paper, even put out a special section. One of the ads in the section caught my attention. The ad, for our on-campus bookstore, includes the following sentence:

Check out our website on Wednesday, March 9 to preorder your championship gear!

This ad looks like a jinx waiting to bite. But more importantly to those interested in writing, "preorder" is not a word. There is no way to "preorder" something, even a championship T-shirt. Even the spell checker, which is the dumbest thing I've ever encountered, knows it's not a word.

The prefix "pre" means "before." So wouldn't "preordering" mean that you bought the T-shirt before the team had won the championship? How would that be possible? You could order something in advance, but in advance of what? What does the "pre" in "preorder" actually refer to? Does it mean you get to order your stuff before everyone else, or before it goes onsale? I don't know how that would work.

Usually, the prefix "pre" is used before a noun to form an adjective. For instance, a preseason game is one that occurs before the season starts and a pregame ritual is something a player does before a game begins. The use of "pre" with the verb "order" makes for an awkward word that doesn't make sense.

Good luck Bears!

Were they that scared?

I've got everyone in the office looking for errors. Sheri, our administrative assistant, found this one in The (Greeley) Tribune.

University of Northern Colorado women's basketball team runs away from Sacramento State University

The Bears did not run away from their opponents. They ran away with the win. A better headline would have read "University of Northern Colorado women's basketball team runs away with win over Sacramento State University."

I'm not being mean; I mean it

One of my colleagues at the University of Northern Colorado brought this error to my attention. We've both found it popping up on student papers recently. Here's the problem:

Jane Smith is a journalism professor. Meaning she teaches journalism at a university.

That's not two sentences. It's a sentence and a sentence fragment. "Meaning that..." is not a full sentence because it cannot stand on its own. This means that it should be connected to the first sentence. Did you see how I avoided the error in that last sentence?

The proper sentence would look like this:

Jane Smith is a journalism professor, which means she teaches journalism at a university.

Notice that I didn't say "... meaning that she teaches journalism ...." I just don't like the sound of that. Also, notice that I used four dots instead of three at the end of the sentence that began this paragraph. Three dots (an ellipses) indicates a pause. Four dots (or an ellipses with a period) indicates a pause followed by the end of a sentence. Paying attention to little things like this makes your writing that much better. And that means a lot.

You just can't make this stuff up

What a headline!

Your verb needs corrected

The following sentence, taken from a paper which shall remain nameless, is just wrong. W-R-O-N-G:

Reilly said Moreno outlined four things that needed corrected before the petition could be approved.

It should be "needed to be corrected" or "needed correcting." I just hate that mistake. It's made far too often in spoken and written English these days. Please try to avoid it.