After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up. [Who or what was doing the typing? The subject of the sentence is “the keyboard”. The word “typing” is a dangling modifier.] Standard Keyboards of Santa Maria, California announced [missing word — “an”] “alphabetical” keyboard that offers user-friendly benefits and quick data entry for any level user. New Standard Keyboards debuted [stylistically awkward… “introduced” would be a less-pretentious alternative] a patented USB-interface [bravo — a correctly hyphenated compound modifier] computer keyboard at CES 2005. This keyboard has just 53-keys [whoops — if that were a “53-key design” then it would need a hyphen, but in this case the hyphen is spurious] and offers many advances over QWERTY and DVORAK designs. —53-keys New Standard Keyboard (Tech-Blog.org)
I’m bleary-eyed from catching typos in the syllabi that I’ve been posting online this past week, but I can’t turn it off. Nobody’s perfect, but where is the verb in that headline? Sheesh.
Some of the well-known details about the QWERTY layout have been attacked as myths. (Maybe we can export some of these keyboards to Nigeria.)
The article that Slashdot featured is obviously based on the company press release, which is of course what the company was hoping would happen when it released its news. But the press release opens with the cringeworthy line, “New Standard Keyboards will debut a new patented design in computer keyboards at the CES show that the company claims has been 130 years in the making.”
130 years… boy, those guys at CES sure take a long time putting their show together, don’t they?
The press release is overly possessive. Do we really need to know in the third graf that the keyboard has been patented in the US and the UK?
But the writer omitted a possessive when editorializing that the new design “differs from other manufacturers failed attempts.”
I know what a hunt-and-peck typist is, but I’m not so sure what “hunt and peck typists” have to do with each other.
Okay, I’ll stop. I do have a weakness for criticizing misguided marketing efforts. (But I’ve also blogged kudos to Hormel’s SPAM.com.)
Post was last modified on 27 May 2016 1:43 am
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We'll have plenty more punctuation fun when we get to Eats, Shoots and Leaves. I can hardly wait... I wish I had taken a class like this when I was an undergraduate.
One would think that a professional writer would at least give a quick look for errors on a paper--even if he/she was pressed for time--before releasing it to the public... One would think a writer would do this, lest he be picked apart by a college English professor who has nothing better to do. q':
On a more serious note, it still shocks me that some media writers are caught up in "American Culture," and that they are so concerned with time constraints and production that they fail to focus on the quality and sometimes accuracy of their works.
Writing is communication and the point can't always get across when there are so many errors on the page. You made a good example with the "hunt and peck typists." How much the exclusion of proper punctuation changes the context of a sentence! It reminds me of the chapter of our reading in EL150, where an absent preposition changes the whole meaning of the chapter.
I hope it turns out that the press release I critiqued was written by a student! I'd write about it in a very different way.
You've got a great attitude towards learning, Heather.
As a student,I receive papers that have been marked abundantly with red ink. I note my typo's for further reference and chalk it up to a learning experience. However, there have been times that anyone could tell I was talking on the phone, or otherwise distracted from the writing. Most of those papers wind up being noted to everyone in the class because of the number of errors. I simply smile and say, Man, it's hard to translate German to English. I knew better than to buy that paper off of the internet. That usually warrants me a trip, with the instructor, to my moms classroom. Where she,in turn, smiles and says, "she speaks perfect German. Don't let her fool you." Oh well, What I'm trying to say is no one is perfect. We all make mistakes. Some we learn from, some we run far,far away from. There are probably several mistakes in what I have typed now. That's alright, I know I'm far from perfect. I am still willing to learn, and that's what it's all about.