Posted by
Print editors no doubt scan for grammar. For the most part, despite the occasional infelicitous construction that slips by, they succeed wonderfully at their jobs. Just consider the vast quantity of printed and spoken words produced everyday and the difficulty of writing correctly and clearly in English, and their achievement starts to seem prodigious. ...Being able to link to this kind of analysis will make my job a whole lot easier...
Unfortunately, this seems to be where editors stop. While run-on sentences, comma splices, split infinitives, and other such grammatical minutiae may rarely make appearances in the best of our nation’s dailies and weeklies, and a small but growing class of press watchdogs help to correct errors of fact (pointing out bias, factual omissions, and distortions), a more perilous corruption lurks under the clean surface of the printed page: specious reasoning.