SCOSE: A toothless pussycat?

When a journalist at ABC-RN News tells you that "the baby died shortly after being delivered from a suspected blood disorder", all you can do is shrug your shoulders and mourn for the baby, the clot and the journalist (the latter two possibly being the same thing).

ABC has a thing called SCOSE, the Standing Committee on Spoken English, but it is assiduously ignored. Why this should be is a mystery to all.

It is not a difficult thing for someone who makes a living out of the spoken word, and for Australia's national broadcaster, to gain some sense of how to structure sentences -- how to put clauses and other parts of sentences into some kind of order that makes sense. I'm not calling for ABC journalists to be Shakespeare or Dickens, just for them to graduate from primary school.

Note to the ABC and SCOSE: the kind of writing referred to above is not unusual but can be heard on any day of the week. It has reached tipping point. No, it has reached chundering point, and once-proud ABC journalism has become a laughing stock. What on earth are you going to do about it?

Categories: scose, abc, australia, australian, english, language, radio, grammar, spelling, pronunciation