Merriam Webster defines ‘bad writing’ thusly: bad writing. verb. 1. Beginning an article with a definition.  Way to go Webster, if I wanted a stupid answer, I would’ve asked this guy.  Or this guy.  Or this guy.  In any case, bad writing is getting to epidemic proportions, and the problems run much deeper than our friend Merriam would like to acknowledge.  Serious news stories (like this one) are being run every day with grievous errors in punctuation, grammar and entirely faulty reporting methods.

This being Friday, school’s back in.  Your old uncle Reggie’s going to give you a quick lesson in getting your write on.  Right on!

Take this story:

Hero Cabbie: I Kicked Burning Terrorist So Hard in Balls That I Tore a Tendon

Obviously it should be ‘in the balls,’ but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  The real issue is that while this headline is certainly intriguing, it’s hardly informative.  What tendon was torn?  Did the hero cabbie tear his own tendon or one of the terrorist’s tendons?  If it was the terrorist’s tendon, do men even have tendons in their balls?  Do terrorists?  Clarity folks.  Look it up.

This is an improvement:

Beauty Pageant Highlights Plight of Landmine Survivors

This is a nice public interest piece, with a tight, informative headline.  The problems arise when we get into the article itself and sift down to this line:

Up to 80,000 people are estimated to have been injured by landmines in Angola, according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.

You see the problem there?  I’m talking about this part: ‘according to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines.’  Why do I need to know this?  If the estimate is 80,000 then the estimate’s 80,000.  Done.  People have short attention spans and you can’t waste their time with this kind of extraneous information.  Like I always say, ‘Sources are for horses.’

And then we have this one:

Doctors Untangle the Strange Case of the Giant Hairball

Now we’re talking, right?  Good story, all the pertinent details in the header, and most of all: it’s topical.  But wait!  Not so fast, CNN.  Looks like someone forgot to fact-check this little detail:

After a scan of the woman's abdomen showed a large mass, doctors lowered a scope through her esophagus.

Now I’m not a doctor, but that’s not right.  Why you would go through someone’s esophagus when you could just go down it?  I commend this brave young journalist for reporting on this disturbing malpractice, but a quick word with these quacks before they ripped a hole in this poor woman’s throat would have been appreciated.  What’s that?  Not my problem?  It wasn’t her problem, either, until she accidentally ate 10 pounds of her own hair.  Grow up.

So that should take care of that.  Did I just make the world a better place?  That’s not for me to say.  I mean, I guess I probably did, but whatever.  No biggie.

That’s just how I do,
Reggie.