Reading, writing and remembering to proof your ads
If there was a rule book of political advertising, Dr Mumbo suspects there’ll be a whole chapter dedicated to when it’s a good idea to check your words for spelling and grammar.
And top of that list would be when making pledges relating to education.
And knowing when an apostrophe is not needed.
Like in The Three Rs, as demonstrated by the National Liberal Party’s Queensland election ad featuring Campbell Newman.
Hat-tip: Mungo @ Ebiquity
actually, it’s not strictly incorrect to pluralise acronyms with an apostrophe – this is about the only time when one can do so (UFO’s, FTE’s). Of course, it’s debatable whether “3R’s” is in fact an acronym, and the custom itself is rapidly falling out of use.
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It’s arbitrary at worst. Certainly not worth the article.
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A recent example was the SMH’s My School calculator which showed how each individual School performed in the NAPLAN assessments in areas such as spelling, reading, grammar,etc. On the first day the heading “Grammar” was spelt with an “e”, by day two they had fixed it. Doh!
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Profligate waste of un-needed apostrophes. If he can’t manage grammar how can you trust him to run the state of Queensland?
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The 3Rs or the Three Rs is not an acronym – it is gramatically incorrect to use an apostrophe
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This reminds me of the time my kids’ school put out a media release that concluded with the slogan “Education at it’s best”.
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Considering the three Rs are Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic, we might have to settle for an apostrophised “R” in this case, since only one of them begins with an r in the first place.
Far worse might be the appropriation of another’s image, pixellated, in Bob Katter’s vid. shame on you.
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I’m with monkeytypist — it is in fact correct punctuation — and with Matty. Haven’t you got something better to be doing?
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It’s not incorrect to use an apostrophe to pluralise initialisms or single letters, to avoid confusion when it’s read. It’s not universal, and many style guides recommend against it, but most call it acceptable.
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> monkeytypist: I disagree, and would love to know where you got your info from.
> Matty: You may be right, but I believe debate around our steadily slipping standards of grammar and punctuation should be encouraged.
A couple of nights ago, I saw this TV promo: “it aint a gossip girl wedding”. Last night, my son saw this one: “Socceroo’s Greatest Moments”. And yes, it was about the team.
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My issue is with the unnecessary capital T in “Teachers”. The word teachers is not a proper noun
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Perhaps it should have read
More teachers to tell you where to put your apostrophe.
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I think the grammar in the ad proves Newman’s point – QLD does need more, and better, teachers.
Better scriptwriters too!
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I just had to share this, from my 24 year old son:
“Someone said it’s arbitrary and not worth the article but it’s when you tolerate small slips in standards that they drop. That is exactly how English grammar usage has degraded over the years – small, incremental drops. We didn’t all just start writing ‘its’ instead of ‘it’s’ or ‘their’ instead of ‘they’re’ or ‘there’. It took a lot of people sleeping through a lot of English classes before correct English usage became what it is today – perfunctorily administered. And I’m done.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself …
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^^^^ What absolute rubbish.
The English language is constantly evolving over time, it has nothing to do with standards getting better or worse.
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I agree with MikeThePom. I still remember an ad on the back of a taxi with an encouraging sporting slogan “Go The Tah’s”.
I get that people spending their time figuring out how to win a game have better things to do than check their apostrophes, but surely someone along the chain would have picked it up before it made it to the mean streets of Sydney traffic.
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I totally agree language usage variations and vocabularies are constantly evolving, almost by the hour it seems, but we are talking here about rules for presentation and grammar that should remain as a consistent infrastructure. English is a major world language and these parts of speech need to remain consistent throughout translations to other ones. Meaning can be altered and misunderstood otherwise. There are plenty of punctuation pedants out there who will just not use/ignore a product/service/etc. if they think standards are getting eroded by them.
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Pete:Yers Dud, I know, quite often in the windy weather my R’s blow off…
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I tnk its a gud advert n w’v 2 aceppt dat en S an evolving lingo
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