The Strong Choices Twitter account is essentially propaganda for the Queensland government’s current campaign to explore ways to reduce the state’s budget deficit. Here’s our tip: propaganda is less effective when it’s filled with spelling and grammatical errors.
“The Queensland Government is committed to encouraging economic literacy throughout the community,” notes one post on the feed. A reasonable goal, but one that requires actual literacy as well. And literacy is not evident in posts like this one:
The People’s Budget is not a survey or a poll. It is an unprescedented consultation for Queenslanders #StrongChoices
— Strong Choices (@StrongChoices) April 20, 2014
As commenters pointed out, there’s no “s” in unprecedented. Similarly, the word “an” is redundant in this tweet:
FACT: QLD has an $80 billion of debt that is costing Qld’er’s $450,000 an hour in interest #strongchoices
— Strong Choices (@StrongChoices) April 23, 2014
Twitter is a casual medium, and the occasional spelling error is to be expected. But this isn’t a casual account: it’s one that is being professionally managed to try and achieve a goal. In that context, accuracy definitely matters.
Lifehacker’s Mind Your Language column offers bossy advice on improving your writing.
Comments
5 responses to “Strong Choices Need Proper Spelling”
I’m right behind Angus’ one man Jihad to clean up the spelling and grammar of Teh Internetz (TM). Also great to see LifeHacker remaining politically unbiased.
Ugh, that “Qld’er’s” is just hideous. Second apostrophe is plain incorrect and the first one is dicey at best. The inconsistent capitalisation grinds my gears too.
You should get a TV show (segment) and tell us more things that “grind your gears”
That’s a great idea… I wonder what you should call it…
You are running a company. Your total debt is 1/3rd of your annual revenue.
Do you:
a) reduce your levels of service to your customers by cutting staff (reduce services)
b) increase the price that you charge for your goods (raise taxes)
c) sell your income generating assets (sell public assets)
Strong choices indeed.
What about:
d) re-finance
e) fire your executive team and replace it with people with previous business experience
f) focus on your core strengths (assuming you have any) and outsource non-critical functions (eg. offshore public payroll services, privatize public staff superannuation, hand over operation of loss-making public services to the commonwealth)
g) reduce the price you charge for your goods so people choose to do business with you instead of your competitors.
h) use your overwhelming majority in the lower house to pass another constitutional amendment to do to the QLD lower house what was done to the state Senate in 1922, thus removing another unnecessary and non-functioning level of government.
umm, h)? No wait, wait h). Yes h), definitely h). I’m going with h).