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Check Your Ad

Talk about irony.  Below is a scan of one of those classified ads run by the newspaper itself to fill in space and promote itself.  This one comes from the May 7th edition of The Kansas City Star, although it has been running just like this, exactly as you see it below, for months.

The very clearly stated purpose, first and in giant letters and in all caps, is to get advertisers to check their ads for errors, which is the first part of the irony because the second part is all the errors in this ad, written by newspaper employees and seen by so many people for so many months.

Let's dive right in.

The first letter of the word "if" should be capitalized because it's the beginning of a sentence.

The phone number should be followed by a period because it's the end of a sentence.

The first letter of the word "we" should be capitalized because it's the beginning of a sentence.

"Cannot" is one word, not two.

The four mistakes above are all straightforward errors in standard English that one learns by maybe fourth grade.

Two more errors one doesn't expect from newspaper employees are not exactly deviations from standard English, but they are questionable.  One is the choice of the ransom-note style of text treatment.  In 22 words there are two fonts, three sizes, some bold, and some especially pointless italics.  This is how people who are brand new to computerly composition of text go about it.  They have so many choices that they think somehow it's better to use as many as possible for the same reason dogs lick their balls.

Second, I disagree with the exact wording of the second sentence, which after corrections reads as follows: "We cannot be responsible for errors beyond the first day."  Of course they can be responsible for such errors if they choose to.  They mean to say they are not responsible, not that they cannot be.

This remarkably dense collection of outright errors and questionable decisions in the wording of these few words is, unfortunately, perfectly representative of just how hard so many of the employees of The Kansas City Star try.

The Kansas City Star is just generally an awful newspaper when it comes to customer service.  The subscription department is staffed by comically incompetent people.

And the billing department is worse, which it's hard to be.

You can read about the incompetence of their ombudsman here, which you'll see is also ironic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

What you're seeing above is three sides of a reeded adult supervision.

 

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