Jose Carillo's Forum

MY MEDIA ENGLISH WATCH

If you are a new user, click here to
read the Overview to this section

Team up with me in My Media English Watch!

I am inviting Forum members to team up with me in doing My Media English Watch. This way, we can further widen this Forum’s dragnet for bad or questionable English usage in both the print media and broadcast media, thus giving more teeth to our campaign to encourage them to continuously improve their English. All you need to do is pinpoint every serious English misuse you encounter while reading your favorite newspaper or viewing your favorite network or cable TV programs. Just tell me about the English misuse and I will do a grammar critique of it.

Read the guidelines and house rules for joining My Media English Watch!

Looks like it’s the end of the road for My Media English Watch

All four of the major Metro Manila broadsheets—the Philippine Daily Inquirer, the Philippine Star, the Manila Bulletin, and The Manila Times—were remarkably free of notable grammar and semantic errors during the past two days (February 20 and 21). I don’t think I missed any significant errors in both their major and minor stories, so I’m delighted to give the current English of each of them a clean bill of health. Based on their largely error-free English performance during the past six weeks, it’s clear to me that their editors and reporters have now become much more zealous about their English. I even have this feeling that all four of them are now running a program of zero tolerance for grammar and usage errors—a happy development that’s great news for their readers and for those who care deeply about good English.

I realize, of course, that this development could be a big letdown to those who have been keenly following my grammar critiques of these broadsheets for the past eight months. Indeed, the archives of my media watch have grown into a substantial resource for English learners, but this growth can no longer be sustained now that the broadsheets are no longer providing enough grist for the mill of my media English watch. If this trend of grammar-perfect English in their pages continues, in fact, I may have to refocus my media watch to the English of the major national TV networks and other media.

In the meantime, I suggest to those looking for continuing fresh instruction in English grammar and usage to regularly visit the Forum’s “You Asked Me This Question” and “Students’ Sounding Board” sections. In place of My Media English Watch, these two sections should be able to provide enough grammar and usage instruction to the conscientious English learner on a continuing basis.

Click to post a comment to this critique

View the complete list of postings in this section




Copyright © 2010 by Aperture Web Development. All rights reserved.

Page best viewed with:

Mozilla FirefoxGoogle Chrome

Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional Valid CSS!

Page last modified: 22 February, 2010, 3:25 p.m.