Fewer and fewer of us curl up with a good book anymore. Who can read nonstop for more than an hour, if that? I won\u2019t bore you with my deep thoughts on why this is\u2014not when I can bore you with so much other nerdy stuff.<\/p>\n
But I will say this: American attention spans started shrinking with the ascendancy of television in the fifties and drugs in the sixties. And now computers and hand-held gadgets have unleashed yet more fiendishly seductive distractions.<\/p>\n
Writers are far from exempt from this cultural inability to concentrate. Here are some recent newspaper and magazine passages that suffer from the same problem: they each fail because their authors somehow zoned out in midsentence.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe speaks in a voice that is both steady, but tinged with emotion<\/strong>.\u201d The writer never went back and reread this sentence before signing off on it. The way out seems so easy: either remove \u201cboth\u201d or change \u201cbut\u201d to \u201cand.\u201d The writer wanted to emphasize the incongruity of the voice\u2019s steadiness despite its emotionality. Usually, \u201csteady\u201d describes someone who\u2019s composed, unruffled, businesslike. Good point \u2026 too bad the sentence is a dud.<\/p>\n \u201cBulb-outs reduce the length of the crossing and also forces the bicyclists to slow down<\/strong>.\u201d \u201cBulb-outs reduce\u201d is a good start, but seven simple words later the subject of the sentence is forgotten and we get \u201cforces.\u201d Obviously it should be \u201cforce.\u201d As in the previous example, the writer couldn\u2019t handle describing two things at once\u2014in this case, the bulb-outs\u2019 appearance and their function. Either change \u201cand\u201d to \u201cwhich\u201d or change \u201calso\u201d to \u201cthis.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow will America stop the flight of U.S. high-tech manufacturing operations from going overseas?<\/strong>\u201d It looks OK until you realize the sentence says that \u201cthe flight\u201d is going overseas. Look again: it should be \u201coperations\u201d that are going overseas. All I can figure is that the writer got intra-sentence amnesia after writing \u201cthe flight of\u201d and so thought it necessary to add \u201cfrom going overseas.\u201d The fix is painless: \u201cHow will America stop the flight overseas of U.S. high-tech manufacturing operations?\u201d or \u201cHow will America prevent U.S. high-tech manufacturing operations from going overseas?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cSmokers have twice the number of problems with their teeth than nonsmokers<\/strong>.\u201d Who\u2019d ever say \u201ctwice the number than\u201d? By the time the writer wrote \u201cthan nonsmokers,\u201d all that went before seems to have been forgotten. It should be either \u201csmokers have more problems than nonsmokers\u201d or \u201csmokers have twice the number of problems that nonsmokers do.\u201d<\/p>\n These examples of writers\u2019 carelessness prove the same thing over and over: America\u2019s attention shortfall has taken its toll. In every case the problem was apparent and the solution was simple. I daresay these mistakes would never have seen the light of day but for one sad fact: We\u2019ve become too lazy to proofread.<\/p>\n \u2014Tom Stern<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fewer and fewer of us curl up with a good book anymore. Who can read nonstop for more than an hour, if that? I won\u2019t bore you with my deep thoughts on why this is\u2014not when I can bore you with so much other nerdy stuff. But I will say this: American attention spans started […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,33,39,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-effective-writing","category-prepositions","category-proofreading","category-subject-and-verb-agreement"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.grammarbook.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}