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Bug #245 
Confusing/ungrammatical sentence in Daily Cal
This bug appeared in a news report published by The Daily Californian on Apr 6, 2010 by Tomer Ovadia.
View the original news report.
Bug Type: Typo, Spelling, Grammar
From the first paragraph:
"Meanwhile, while many officials currently in office have touted significant achievements, they have promises yet to be fulfilled."
That last phrase is ungrammatical or inaccurate. It should be "they have made promises" or "their past promises remain unfulfilled" or the like.
Response
Sumana Harihareswara has not contacted The Daily Californian
Discussion Leave a comment
This "bug" is utter nonsense--this amateur grammarian seems to be operating on premises of his or her own devising. The noun "promise" has a future implication, so the proposed clumsy additions of explicit tenses add nothing to either clarity or style. The student newspaper writer's sentence is perfectly intelligible. I hope this site will not waste a lot of time rehashing outdated presciptive grammar--please consult anyone in UC Berkeley's linguistics department for further advice.
P.S. The book that explains it all is American Tongue and Cheek by Jim Quinn, available on Amazon where there's a good review too.
I thought the line was confusing because it wasn't clear when the candidates had made the relevant promises: the past election? the intervening time? The sentence might be technically grammatical but I still think it is confusing. I'm not saying it's completely unintelligible but I think the author could add some clarity. If you understood it the first go, good for you! :-)
Hi, Becky -- I share your preference for avoiding too much prescriptive grammar, and thanks for the book pointer. But please refrain from couching your criticism in personal invective. You don't know who might be a professional grammarian, after all.
Actually, I do know who might be a professional grammarian, because they're few and far between these days,and I probably know most of them. But this kind of nit-picking, especially for something in a student paper, when papers everywhere are in trouble, is akin to dusting the deckchairs on the Titanic. And who watches the watchdogs? Your critic uses some phrases herself that are...I believe the PC term is "not in my dialect". e.g."If you understood it the first go"--a bit Anglophile, what?
Ms. O'Malley, if you want to discuss whether student newspapers should get a free pass, whether MediaBugs should allow nitpicking, dialect, bug reporting style, etc., etc., we should probably take that out of this particular bug report discussion. You can find my contact information at http://www.harihareswara.net if you want to talk with me, or you can contact the MediaBugs administrators at http://mediabugs.org/contact .
I sure don't assume that my peculiar and pedantic nitpickiness is the primary point of MediaBugs. So please, please, drown me out with more interesting and useful bug reports! :)
Becky, this bug was initially filed as part of our closed beta. I don't think anyone thought it was earth-shattering. We're testing our software.
I've opened a discussion over on the MediaBugs blog about whether we should be including copy-edit/grammar/writing-quality issues or not in the project.
I don't view journalism today as the Titanic, because that implies that it's doomed, and I don't believe that. Instead, I think we're in a period of transition and turmoil. MediaBugs is one small experiment in trying to find new models and systems for authority and accountability as older ones fall apart around us.
As for "who watches the watchdogs," well, this whole project is out in the open, so I think the answer is: anyone who wants to can watch us, and raise questions, and we'll do our best to respond.