Freelance Unbound

Just how bad can journalism student assessment work be, in terms of spelling, grammar, punctuation and general accuracy?
The answer: pretty bad.
Let’s have a look at some of the most common (certainly the most noticeable) problems with student assessment work this year.

1. Apostrophes
   No student, absolutely none, has the remotest clue how to use the apostrophe. They are scattered in copy like wheat grains after harvest, with no consistency or clue as to what they’re for. Generally they are used to indicate a plural, but not always. In some students’ work, you could have taken every apostrophe from its place and put it where there wasn’t an apostrophe*, and ended up with infinitely cleaner copy. The odd thing is, however, that when I ran a punctuation test, many of the students didn’t do all that badly. It seems they can handle the apostrophe better when they’re thinking about it, but that they don’t actually bother to think when they write. Which is a worry.
2. Capital letters
   A very tenuous grasp of what the capital letter is actually for. Students cannot consistently cap up proper names (I do wonder if they even know what the term “proper name” actually means), and randomly cap up ordinary words, for no apparent reason. I’m not just talking about tricky brand names that even real sub-editors have to check a style guide for – like “iPad” – but celeb names and places (Miley cyrus, hollywood). And it’s not just the odd typo. The writing is littered with random capitalisation. Often this extends to the personal pronoun. What do they teach the kids at school nowadays? Jeez – I feel and sound old. Or, in today’s parlance, i feel and sound Old.
3. There/their/they’re
   Another common area of ignorance – some mix them up, others simply use “there” for all three words. Not sure why, but I find this strangely disturbing.
4. Run-on sentences
   A very, very common trait in student writing. Sentences just go on and on, with each thought separated, more or less accurately, by a comma. A full stop will be added when the writer runs out of steam – possibly at the end of a paragraph, maybe when they run out of material (otherwise known as the end of the story), sometimes before the end. Of a sentence which, is weird.
5. Would of/could of
   Also very common in student writing – in so many ways. Understandable because of the tendency not to enunciate English any more (I could’ve spoken more clearly, but then I would’ve had to make an effort). But hideous.

What does all this say (apart from confirming that I’m a ghastly snob)?
There’s something dreadfully wrong with our school system if it turns out people with little or no ability to control the English they write – especially if they then go into a university degree that’s based on the ability to communicate in English.
But there isn’t much we can do about it now. Once you’ve spent 12 years or so not being taught the importance of getting English right, and not losing anything for it if you get it wrong, it’s going to be difficult to correct things at this stage.
Especially since university perpetuates this by not really judging student work on spelling, grammar and puntuation. (Yes, we do dock some marks – but there are other “Learning Outcomes” we have to take on board. You can get a reasonable pass at degree level without ever really addressing this.)
Maybe it doesn’t actually matter. Assuming my generation of students are the audience for media as well as its future creators, they won’t notice the mistakes anyway.

*Though where one might, logically, go.

From early this month (because it’s been knocking around the house and I’ve only just got around to glancing at it before I put it in the recycling bin) – here’s the Guardian Money report on uSwitch’s annual broadband satisfaction survey.

What’s wrong with this piece of simple reportage?

It couldn’t be simpler, really. In fact, this is the kind of job you should give to the intern or editorial assistant, because all it involves is looking at the uSwitch survey results (right) and writing them up for your reader. Because readers can’t you know, make sense of the results by looking at the table itself.

Well, certainly Miles Brignall of the Guardian couldn’t make sense of the results by looking at the table itself.

Here’s what he said:

The survey, based on responses from more than 7,500 broadband customers, found that 92% of O₂‘s customers are satisfied overall – compared with just 44% of Orange users who said they were happy with their firm’s customer service

So, that’s clear – O2 has a whopping 92% satisfaction result, while Orange is terrible, with just 44% satisfaction.

But this isn’t right. Later on, the story says:

Orange has continued its dismal run. Despite a brief respite last year, it is back at the bottom with a 70% score for overall satisfaction.

I had to go back and read everything again, because I could have sworn Orange had a lousy 44% satisfaction rating. Look, I’m right – there in the little graphic table in the story (right) is a list of stats that shows Orange with 44% “Service satisfaction”.

But hang on – it also shows O2 with a 79% satisfaction rating. I thought it said 92% earlier. What’s going on?

What’s going on is that the Guardian story is mixing two entirely different metrics – overall satisfaction and satisfaction with customer service. It does actually say so in the text (though you could be forgiven for missing the detail). And I think the author knows the difference – but it’s confusing for the reader. Especially as the helpful graphic that the Guardian uses to show what it’s talking about has made the same mistake.

It’s as if the sub-editor or designer who was asked to create the graphic had a quick look at the story, saw the reference to the 44% Orange rating and thought “ah, that’s the bit of the uSwitch survey they’re talking about – I’ll pull that out of the results”.

Instead, whoever put this page together should have used the overall satisfaction rating – because that’s the ultimate result. And the writer should have compared like with like, instead of muddying the water and confusing both the Guardian‘s production staff and its readers.

And it would have been helpful to have a proper comparison chart of how the companies did compared to 2009. Instead, the story just gave us the change for AOL and TalkTalk (up 6% and down 3%, respectively). Checking on the uSwitch web site showed that O2’s 92% was the same as last year – but the numbers are not available for Orange, Virgin and BT.

Come on – if you’re going to look at a survey, try to be organised and consistent about it. Otherwise just print the survey results untouched and let the readers interpret it. It’ll save time and effort, and probably be more accurate.

“Faze”: “to cause to be disturbed or disconcerted”. As in: the journalism lecturer was seldom fazed by the constant mis-spellings and poor grammar of his students.
“Phase”: “a stage in a process of change or development”. As in: she wanted to work in the media, but luckily it was just a phase she was going through.
This pairing can be a bit of a puzzle, but don’t be fazed. Many journalists go through a phase of getting it wrong, but sometimes they get over it.

What matters to those LibDem voters who hate the idea of hooking up with a Tory government? Social justice? The environment? European integration? Proportional representation?

Whatever it is, it’s probably not civil liberties, as this fascinating tool from the Liberal Democrat Voice web site shows.

“Authoritarian vs. liberal” tracks the voting patterns of MPs to 10 key civil liberties issues, from ID cards and 90 days detention to trial by jury and the DNA database.

So, how authoritarian is your MP? If you are in a Labour seat, the chances are that’ll be quite autocratic…

(Photo credit: Stephen Johnson)

Much furore on last night’s Question Time about the nascent coalition government – the LibDems “betrayed” their voters by jumping into bed with the ghastly Conservatives.

And now the country is being run by a party that was opposed by 74% of the electorate. It’s all so sordid and unprincipled. The politicians just did a deal to get power!

Or, to look at it another way, the government is made up of MPs from parties voted for by 17.5 million voters – or 59.1% of the electorate.

Let’s have a look at the votes gained in some past results.

• 1906: Liberal landslide – 49.4%
• 1931: Conservative landslide (but National Government) – 55%
• 1945: Labour Landslide – 48%
• 1966: Labour landslide – 48%
• 1983: Conservative landslide – 42.3%
• 1997: Labour landslide – 43.2%

According to the marvellous (and accurate enough) Wikipedia: 1931 was “the last election, and the only one under universal suffrage, where one party (the Conservatives) received an absolute majority of the votes cast”.

More people have had their democratic inclinations represented in the current government than in any single party majority government in the past century. So why are so many people so cross?

I think this is because many people don’t really understand the nature of our democracy. We don’t vote for a prime minister (take note, BBC political editor Nick Robinson), nor do we vote for political parties (no,really, technically, we don’t).

Actually, we vote for individuals (with party affiliations) to represent us in parliament. And given that we ought to have some sort of government after all that election business, it seems not unreasonable to expect them to come to some sort of arrangement to allow that to happen.

As for the accusations that the politicians just did a deal to get power – what on earth does everyone expect? Of course they did. They stand in elections in order to get power. That’s the point of elections. It’s what you have to do to actually, you know, form a government.

(DISCLAIMER: I’d quite like the government to do less running the country and more leaving us all alone to get on with things, but that’s just me.)

Also, people don’t have much of a sense of history. Our current experience of majority government followed by majority government time after time is relatively new. Look back before the Second World War and you see coalition governments and weak minority governments stretching back to Victorian times – in fact, to the start of our modern electoral system.

Frankly, if anyone gets that upset about the muddy compromise that is happening now in UK politics, I think they need to go and make a nice cup of tea and have a sit down. In the end, once you get past the tribalism, governments are much of a muchness. We’ll probably survive all the horrific betrayal of principles – until the next time.

Just for the hell of it, I spent last Thursday night’s election on Twitter (on TweetDeck, since you ask – thanks for the tip, Soilman).
At the same time, I watched the BBC’s new coverage. I wanted to see what value, if any, each one had in following and understanding the events of the night.
I’ve covered some of the media’s election limitations here and here. But it’s interesting to see how Twitter performed as a medium of information and analysis. The result? At least as well as the BBC in some ways.
First, it’s absolutely true that Twitter is full of drivel. It’s the equivalent of being in a crowded and noisy pub with a group of people that you vaguely know, having a conversation via SMS.
On the other hand, pick your pub-goers carefully, and there’s some value in it. While old-style big media was still getting to grips with the night’s real story (the polling station debacle) and starting to report on the actual events, some Twitterers were thinking more critically about what had happened.
Faced with what seemed to be an unprecedented electoral situation, returning officers acted in different ways. Some locked voters out or called in police to handle them. Others tried harder to accommodate voters.
In Lewisham, apparently, two polling stations stayed open after 10pm to allow voters to cast their ballots. This was duly reported on the BBC – but it took a blogger to do the basic research and report that this would actually be illegal. (In the event, a Lewisham council spokesman claimed the move was within the law as the ballot papers had been handed out before the 10pm cut-off, according to the Guardian.)
Malcolm Coles went to the Electoral Commission web site and checked the facts, reporting them on Twitter as he wrote them up on a blog post between 11.53pm and 12.16am. It was another 20 minutes before the BBC found someone from the Electoral Commission to bring into the studio to talk about the ramifications of it all. (As Coles Tweeted, “I wonder if she is reading from my blog”.)
Actually, I’m sure the BBC must have started researching the story earlier – it takes time to marshal interviewees and prepare questions. But it’s interesting to see how fast social media could respond quite substantively to events, and how perceptive and enquiring its users can be.
I also saw links to the first mobile phone coverage of the polling station snafu via Twitter – some via the Telegraph web site, some direct from YouTube – a little before they began to be shown on TV.
In the end I didn’t really add anything of any value to the conversation (as I’m sure participants will confirm). But it was interesting to see how useful it was as a tool for collating information from disparate sources and sharing it with the crowd.

[youtube width=”300″ height=”200″]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVLnZfVfUnw[/youtube]The main problem for the media during last week’s election was that it was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The real story didn’t happen at the count – where all the reporters were eagerly awaiting whatever electoral upset was on the cards – but at the polling stations.
It was there that our democracy got a bit frayed around the edges – producing fractious crowds of disenfranchised voters who couldn’t take part as they were forced to wait beyond the close of polling in long, US-style queues.
It’s a far cry from the usual drafty and sparsely attended village hall. But even though turnout was up a few percentage points from its 2001 low, it was still significantly down on the typical post-War 70-80%. Something had gone seriously wrong with democracy.
But who was there to tell the tale? No one except the people themselves, who harangued the police and the returning officers, and took plenty of mobile video footage to document it.
This then became the basis for the media’s reporting of events. A clear example of how old-style media now relies on front-line user-generated reportage – and proof that it simply can’t hope to be everywhere it’s needed.
Whenever “professional” journalists get sniffy about so-called “citizen journalists”, remind them that they had to get their real election story from YouTube.

It’s interesting to see this from the BBC, which has some handy interactive digital graphics on its web site to show how the different voting systems work, in the run-up to most likely adopting one.
What I want to know is how on earth they can apply the alternative vote system to the 2010 result, when as far as I know no opinion polling was carried out to find out who people would have voted for as their second choice.
There’s a pervasive “progressive” political view that any vote not for the Conservatives is a vote against the Conservatives. Hence the spate of commentary in recent days that suggested a Rainbow Coalition of all the not-Conservative parties in Parliament, bar those obviously not-progressive unionists in Northern Ireland, was the only way to really meet the UK electorate’s democratic needs.
But this of course requires one to know exactly how the minority party voter would have voted had there not been a minority party candidate to vote for. In effect, how they would have apportioned their votes under one of the alternative voting systems that we use in the European elections and are now being mooted for UK general elections.
I wonder if some lazy political assumptions have been made at the Corporation…

Nearly 30 years ago, David Steel told the Liberal Party to “go back to your constituencies, and prepare for government”. I wonder if, three decades later, they’re actually ready for it…

Spotted on Journalism.co.uk, a journalism job ad for a blogger/opinion former to cover the foreign exchange markets.
“Great,” think the mass of underemployed hacks scouring the classifieds. “I could turn my hand to that. Let’s see, what does it need? Hmm – ‘Must have a genuine interest in financial markets’. Well, I don’t know much about economics, but I’m sure I could blag it. After all – how hard can it be to blog a few opinions? I do it on WordPress all the time…”
Not so fast. A closer look scuppers that idea. Here are some of the requirements:

• PhD (in hand) in Mathematics (pure or applied fields) or Statistics (applied or theoretical).
• Good background in Probability Theory, Statistics, and Game Theory.
• Knowledge of C++, Matlab, or Perl is desirable.
• Must have interest in using programming to conduct empirical experiments.

Yes – I think not many applicants will be quoting Journalism.co.uk when they apply for that position…