If you feel a news story does not measure up to expected journalistic standards, bring it to the Journalism Dry Cleaner. Through our collective wisdom, we will strip it of all offensive dirt.

REAL TIME VISITORS

LIVE STATS

BLOG GUESTS

Wednesday 25 April 2018

ADVERTORIAL CONTENT AND LANGUAGE EXPERIMENTS

Language is supposed to be dynamic. The aim is to ensure every possible aspect of humanity can be coded in a form that can be meaningfully expressed, either through native or borrowed words. But this flexibility is not permission to violate language structures, especially in formal communication. Editorial and advertorial content should not contain language experiments.


Sure, it's good to be unique, but I'm not sure the media can push the creativity boundary beyond the realm of making grammatical sense.

After all, the central aim of a newspaper is to provide readers with information that is packaged in a way that directly communicates the intended meaning, or at least provides adequate context for relevant interpretation of the information being conveyed.


There's leeway for the one crafting the headline to play around with words in order to come up with captivating headings.

But the language of poetry might not always work, when deployed in a newspaper article.

Moreover, as it has been argued here on several occasions, a newspaper should not distance itself from the errors contained in advertisements, supplements or even externally produced inserts that form part of the publication.


In my view, everything published in a newspaper ought to have first passed through the usual editorial process.

To believe otherwise is to invite language experiments, and other forms of editorial or advertorial misadventures.
















No comments: