What county is that?

Just east of Orlando, and home to Cape Canaveral—the focal point of America's space-exploration program—is Brevard County. Although its boundaries have been redrawn many times, Brevard County has existed in some form or other since 1856.

You'd think that after being around for 155 years that central Florida TV news reporters would be able to correctly pronounce its name.

But no! Several reporters in the Orlando area (especially one weatherman in particular) consistently refer to the county as "Bevard," pronouncing the name as "buh-VARD."

Why can't they get it right? Their only job is to use their voices to report news, weather, and sports. Interestingly enough, a little farther south on Florida's east coast is Broward County. Yet none of these reporters ever talk about "Boward" County. Also, none of them say "bing" instead of "bring," and they don't say "bought" instead of "brought." So why drop the "r" in "Brevard"?

So come on, talking heads—step up your game! Stretch those mouth muscles, and make the extra effort it takes to get it right! Brevard County deserves no less.

It's just words ...

Recently someone (let's call him "Stan") took me completely by surprise by asking me to drop everything and immediately edit a huge body of Web text—when I was already struggling to meet tight deadlines on several big projects. I pointed out how long it would take to accomplish the task (about a full eight-hour day) and tried to propose an alternative plan that would push out some of the non-essential editing for a week or two until I could clear off my deadline plate.

Stan was not happy about the editing taking so long; he had already made up his mind that I should be able to finish the job in two or three hours.

"How could it take so long to edit this text?" Stan asked. "It's just words."

"It's just words." Hmmmm. The fact that Stan could even make such a statement about writing reflects a critical problem faced by many business, marketing, and technical writers: lack of respect for their professional skill.

Far too many people (especially technical and business types) slept through 12 years of English class and have never taken a single class in writing (yes, those are two different subjects!) Their writing "experience" is limited to producing an occasional business report and drafting an annual letter to Grandma. And yet they claim to be writing experts!

Let's project the "Stan scenario" onto a few other professions, and see how it sounds:

• Car owner to mechanic: "How come it takes so long to rebuild the engine? It's just parts!"
• Businessman to programmer: "How could it take so long to update the accounting software? It's just lines of code!"
• Homeowner to builder: "How could it take so long to complete my room addition? It's just pieces of lumber!"
• Patient to doctor: "How could it take so long to treat my cancer? It's just cells!"
• Builder to architect: "How could it take so long to finish those blueprints? It's just a bunch of drawings!

"It's just words?" Far from it! Words represent ideas. They are the tangible expression of concepts. Words give life to thinking—and thinking is, quite simply, the hardest work a human being can do.

Thomas Edison's favorite quote was from the noted 18th-painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who observed, "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking."

The bottom line? Good, tight, powerful writing is not just stacking up piles of word blocks. It's like weaving an elaborate tapestry of thought. To edit that kind of writing, you can't just knock down the word pile and rearrange it. No, you have gently pull apart the threads and then carefully reweave the ideas and concepts to ensure they still make sense.

And that, my friends—like it or not—takes time. Lots of time.

New Crispy Shtrips? Yuk!

[I originally posted this blog entry in 2010—and it's even worse in 2011! Several news anchors and reporters in the Orlando area are doing it consistently. It's my shtrong opinion that many of them need to be retrained.]

Listen for this—you'll be surprised how often you hear it: People are increasingly using "shtr" in their speech instead of "str". Example: A commercial announcer talks about "crispy shtrips" instead of "crispy strips". Or a newscaster reports on a "conshtruction project" instead of "construction project".

If you listen closely, you'll hear it frequently: Jay Leno does it way too often. It's also becoming common in national TV ads, and I've heard it from the lips of several newscasters here in Orlando.

The worst offenders seem to be today's "Gen Y" types. I recently sat through a 45-minute marketing seminar during which the 25-year-old female presenter used it constantly, repeatedly saying things like "shtructure", "conshtrain", "shtraight", "shtrike", and so forth. In all, she used this lazy, faulty pronunciation more than 100 times during that brief seminar!

Does anyone know how this got started? I first remember hearing it several years ago in a TV commercial—a couple of hip-hop dudes were promoting the "power shtripes" in a new deodorant.

Finally, how is it that TV announcers, news broadcasters, and others are being allowed to perpetuate it? Does anyone even care?

Shouldn't this lazy way of speaking be shtricken from our lexicon?

Dang!!! It's smokey!!!

Cloudy tonight!!!
Sunny tomorrow!!!
Rain on Thursday!!!

This is how one Orlando-area TV station displays the on-screen bulleted list they use to highlight the weather reporter's forecast.

This has been going on for years!!! Every bullet point of the forecast is written in huge bold italics, followed by three exclamation points—regardless of the normalcy or severity of the forecast!!!

What if a hurricane were threatening? I wonder how many exclamation points they would need to provide the proper emphasis?

And with all the wildfires here in Florida this week, the word "smoky" is frequently bandied about. But the TV station always spells it with an "e"—as in "Smokey Bear," not "smoky air."

So how many exclamation points will they use when the next hurricane approaches Orlando? And will they ever realize they're misspelling "smoky"?

Stay tuned to Orlando's own WKMG, Local 6 News!!!!!

Who That?

One of the English gaffs I find the most annoying is when on-camera news reporters and advertising announcers refer to people not as persons, but as things. This goof-up is becoming increasingly common, and I can't figure out why people do it.

What I'm talking about is the use of the word that in place of the word who when referring to people. For example, I recently watched a local TV news broadcast about an Orlando cultural event. The reporter editorialized, "Everyone that attended had a great evening."

Say what?

Forget the fact that such editorializing is foolish, unnecessary, and annoying in the extreme. If the reporter simply had to make an observation, the proper way to phrase the comment would have been, "Everyone who attended had a great evening."

Sometime later I was listening to a very serious ad promotion for a hospital system in Wisconsin. The announcer intoned, "XYZ Healthcare is staffed with experienced professionals that really care about your needs."

Oh really?

Are those professionals robots? Or are they human beings? If they're people, they should always be referred to as who rather than that.

People that write for ads and news broadcasts should know better! And so should reporters that speak on camera!

Spelling—Why Can't TV Stations Get It Right?

Orlando's local news broadcasts are always a hoot—although their producers don't intend them to be. The humor comes from the constant stream of spelling errors that appear on-screen. Everything seems to be up for grabs in the "how-bad-can-we-mangle-it" contest: Titles, personal names, city names, and pretty much everything else that can be written is spelled incorrectly almost every day when the news stations display text on-screen.

Don't the captioning machines have some sort of spell-checker? Can't the TV stations hire someone who has a clue about spelling to operate the captioning machine?

Does anyone except me even care?

Technodufi

Why is it that so many TV and print reporters are such technology dufi (plural of dufus)? Or more to the point, why do they let their techno-illiteracy show so openly?

I don't expect every reporter to be an aspiring rocket scientist or brain surgeon. But when reporters write or talk about technological issues, why must they scramble the facts so often—and so badly?

For example, there's the Orlando TV news anchor who talked about how space-shuttle astronauts were viewing the Earth "from millions of miles in space." Fortunately, someone in the studio pointed out to her that the shuttle orbits at an altitude of about 200 miles.

I once worked with the editor-in-chief of a vertical-market technology magazine (let's call it, say, "Banking Technology") who did not know how a PC works. I was handling public relations for a banking software company, and I had to give this clueless editor a two-hour tutorial in how a PC works before she could understand what our software did.

Several years ago I was interviewed by a Wall Street Journal reporter about my love for the Apple Macintosh. A few days later, I got another call from a WSJ fact-checker. He was calling to verify the details of what I had said to ensure that my story was told accurately. Why can't more publications go that extra mile? After all, all they have to offer their audiences is information. Why can't they do everything possible to ensure that what they publish is accurate information?

Let's face it: From iPhones to computerized sewing machines, the modern world is driven and supported by technology. It's a sad state of affairs when people whose job is communicating technical information have no knowledge of technology, and/or are unwilling to collaborate with technology experts to ensure what they report is accurate.

What about you? What technical blunders have you heard or seen from the media technodufi?