Monday, November 16, 2009

The Importance Of Punctuation.

Newspapers often use quote marks when covering criminal cases in order to not appear to be actually accusing a suspect of a crime, so much so that it must be so routine that they forget why they are using quotation marks in the first place.

I'm guessing this is why when I saw the Sun in the newsagents today it had this headline:
'Night Stalk' rapist charged
Whereas the online edition currently has this subtly different headline:
'Night Stalk rapist' charged
A small but very important difference. Being called a "Night stalker" isn't the bit that they are supposed to treat as unproven, 'Night Stalker' actually sounds kind of awesome, but the 'rapist' is thus far only an accusation.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Or like Gordon Brown "An end to boom and bust" which should read "An end to boom, and bust" (I cant take credit for this but can't remeber the blog I got it off )

James Higham said...

er .........yes