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Mocking Poor Grammar
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A noun that is formed from a verb and which describes an action. In English it ends in -ing, eg 'the baking of bread' and 'Smoking damages your health'.

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The Definete Article

Typos, design

Posted by Tom on 3rd April, 2009

If you have ever worked in the design industry, whether with or as a designer, you may have noticed that designers have a tendency to look at text rather than read it.

For someone who works in the design industry and also happens to be an irksome, smug grammar pedant (ie. someone like me), this throws up plenty of opportunity for savage, too-late-it’s-gone-to-the-printer wind-uppery. But that’s for another post.

Anyway, it’s nice to know that there are designers out there with a passion for nitpicking to rival the most irksomely smug grammar pedant. The rather wonderful PhotoshopDisasters primarily focuses on shaming acts of PhotoShop laziness, ignorance and buffoonery, but every so often they gleefully post something along the lines of this:

Deeply imprecise design

Skewering bad design and bad spelling. Lovely.

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5 Comments »

1. I know this is GrammarBlog not PunctuationBlog, but shouldn’t that be “(i.e., someone like me)”?

   Comment by Ant — 17th June, 2009 @ 4:14 pm

2. You make a good point, Ant. But I made a deliberate stylistic decision. To me, (i.e., is punctuation overload. I don’t think the comma is required, and the double full stops just feel fussy to me. So my personal rule is to add a single full stop when a common abbreviation has lowercase letters(ie. “eg” and “ie”). I make an exception with “etc”, as it is usually only found at the end of clauses and is followed by a punctuation mark anyway.

   This is my own rule by the way; I encourage a debate on the subject.

   Comment by Tom — 17th June, 2009 @ 4:25 pm

3. Great post, I get annoyed by bad grammar too and I think that this post shows it at its worst!

   Comment by Danielle Ingram — 30th June, 2009 @ 9:16 am

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