For recent j-school graduates, Walt explains English "confusables"

Walt was dismayed -- no, shocked! -- last week last week to see a story in the local Daily Fishwrap headlined "EMS team repels down gorge". Apart from a stern letter to the editor urging him to hire an English-speaking sub-editor, I haven't written anything since.

Do they teach English in journalism schools nowadays, I asked. Do they do any vocabulary-building exercises? Does spelling count? Are any of these things important any more? Or do "journalists" these days rely on their spell-checkers and e-thesauri?

Walt urges journalist wannabes and other aspiring writers to remember that the computer is merely a dumb beast of burden. It does what you tell it, no more and no less. If the spell-checker, let's say, gives you a choice, you still have to know the rules of spelling and grammar to make the correct choice.

So also with vocabulary. You have to know the meanings of words in order to spell them correctly. Is it "know" and "no"? "To" or "too"? Thanks to "text-talk" the trend is now to treat those distinctions as unimportant. If you write "I didn't no that", people will still geddit...right? They won't think you mean "I didn't deny that." Right?

Then there's the matter of contractions. We're talking grammatical contractions here, not the physical kind as in childbirth. But it seems recent graduates of j-school know more about the latter than the former, as we see from the frequent misuse of "there" for "they're" or, even more frequently, "your" for "you're".

As part of our little effort to raise the standards of written English -- or at least prevent them from slipping any further -- Walt will tell you the meanings and proper spellings of these "confusables".

"Your" = possessive, "belonging to you"
"You're" = contraction of "you are"
"Yore" = a long, long time ago, "days of yore"

"Their" = possessive, "belonging to them"
"They're" = contraction of "they are"
"There" = not here, "over there"

People who call themselves writers should know the difference. If you make a mistake writing a comment on one of Walt's posts, Ed. will print it just the way you wrote it, revealing your linguistic ineptitude for all to see.