Wednesday, September 10, 2014

"Lude behavior"


We might be tempted to think television journalists don't have to worry about spelling and grammar the way print journalists do... but errors in the text broadcast news outlets use on-screen are embarrassing, too.

This screen should have been about charges of lewd behaviour, not lude behaviour.

I suspect whoever wrote this headline simply hadn't ever seen "lewd" in writing, and spelled it the way it sounds -- which is tough to address, because you don't know what you don't know until you find out you didn't know what you thought you knew.

You know?

Having a skilled copy editor (who has a wide vocabulary and strong spelling and grammar) review all text that will go to air can help avoid errors like this one.




2 comments:

  1. And reading! Read lots! If that producer read a wide variety of books, he/she would have stumbled on lewd at some point. But that of course leads to another problem - I get so many new words from books. I may be able to spell them, but I can't always pronounce them :)) Makes for some embarrassing on-air moments!

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  2. Absolutely! As I was writing this post, I actually tried to remember where I might first have been exposed to the word "lewd" in print. (Can't say for sure!) Readers generally make the best spellers -- so anyone challenged by spelling may be able to improve by doing more reading.

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