#68: Proofreading

Auntie needs to up her proofreading game. The standard of English on the BBC Radio 4 website has deteriorated over the past few years. I recently counted these mistakes in the 250-word blurb for the You and Yours weekly consumer rights programme:

5 vocabulary

3 grammar

3 style

1 each spelling, syntax, punctuation

Mistakes included ‘stationary’ instead of ‘stationery’; ‘concerns of the subscription trap’ instead of ‘concerns about the subscription trap’ and this sentence:

Tourism tax, you may have come across it if your travelled abroad, but increasingly they are being used around the UK as well.

Syntax (what’s the object doing out on its own at the beginning of the sentence?); grammar: it should be ‘you’ve’ travelled’ not ‘your travelled’ abroad; and finally, ‘it’ not ‘they’ for an uncountable noun, ‘tourism tax’.

I would correct this sentence to:

You may have come across a tourism tax if you’ve travelled abroad, but increasingly you will find them around the UK as well.

Do such mistakes matter?

Even Orwell in ‘Politics and the English Language’, which demonstrated how indiscriminating use of language stops us thinking properly, didn’t think correct grammar and syntax mattered per se. A defence of the English language, he said, ‘… has nothing to do with correct grammar and syntax, which are of no importance so long as one makes one’s meaning clear’. In fact there is only one mistake in the You and Yours piece which impedes meaning (‘concerns of the subscription trap’ sounds like the trap has concerns, whereas ‘concerns about…’ means our concerns about it).

Yes they matter, because…

I think good grammar and vocabulary matter, and these are my reasons:

1. Good grammar and vocabulary aid precision. If you read ‘fall foul to the [subscription] trap’, as on the site, instead of the correct ‘fall foul of the trap’, you may understand the main meaning, that someone has been caught out, but be unsure whether the writer means something slightly different. (In addition, ‘fall foul of’ often means that someone has done something wrong – I would change this to ‘fall into this trap’.)

2. If you are distracted by inaccurate English when reading, it detracts from focusing on the sense.

3. Incorrect English undermines one’s professionalism and gives an impression of being poorly educated.

It is especially important for BBC. It is in their Royal Charter ‘to show the most creative, highest quality and distinctive output and services’. Good grammar and vocabulary are part of such output, and enable creativity. In fact, the BBC itself has a (very good) service for teaching English and its own grammar guide. It’s not a good look if one’s own use of language is poor.

Does the BBC need a head of grammar?

The BBC has a department for pronunciation, but none for grammar and vocabulary. In 2007 the Queen’s English Society criticised BBC presenters’ grammar and recommended the corporation employ a full-time head of grammar (with ‘100 unpaid “monitors” working from home’! Why unpaid?). It is easier to correct written than spoken English and with today’s AI checkers (which of course themselves need to be checked) is faster than ever. Perhaps the BBC used AI, but forgot the human check?

My suggested corrections to the You and Yours piece are here.