Have you read anything lately? a newspaper; a magazine; a book? I have, and I’ve been grinding my teeth.

I know times are tough for the print media, but they really need copy editors and proof readers. Read anything carefully, and you’ll find all kinds of sloppiness. Missing words (mostly articles and prepositions) are the most common. Sentence fragments are the next most frequent. Grammatical errors abound: misplaced modifiers, disagreement of case, and the like. Wrongly chosen homonyms are sprinkled here and there, as are malapropisms.

The latest thing I’ve noticed, and it goes far beyond punctuation errors, is that many newspaper articles have entire paragraphs, or fragments of paragraphs, repeated. Good Lord, if you can’t learn to type at least learn to copy and paste properly.