Greetings. The effort to collect and chronicle information, regardless of topic, is of absolute importance. For reasons that go without saying, that effort including the collection of witness testimonials. Attorneys, journalists, UFO investigators, and law enforcement officials are all aware of the necessity to accurately collect information, accurately being the operative word.
When information is not collected in an accurate manner, details can be lost or misinterpreted, which can lead professionals astray. The parties involved can become misinformed as a result of inaccurate or misleading content. The correct usage of the English language is part of that all-important and worthwhile endeavor.
I was recently made aware of my unfortunate misusage of the terms "its" and "it's" by Mr. Art Levine, an award-winning journalist who works as a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly. Mr. Levine has written for Salon, Truthout, The Atlantic, and The Daily Beast, among other publications, so he certainly qualifies as a highly credentialed and experienced journalist. The comment he left behind on a blog posting I had recently shared in a Facebook group reads as follows, and I quote: "Grammar: it's should read its. Both nature magazine and the New York Times have plenty of rebuttals to Looeb'sclaims." I was very thankful for the grammatical correction provided by Mr. Levine, but the rest of the comment left me puzzled. I thought that all journalists used the English language correctly to inform the masses, but I was completely wrong. Not only did Mr. Levine not capitalize the name of Nature Magazine, but he misspelled Avi Loeb's last name as "Looeb."
Now to be perfectly clear, nobody is perfect. If I had a dime for every error I have made during the course of writing an article or composition, I could buy a round-trip ticket to Mars. However, I am not an award-winning journalist, I only write as a passionate hobby, nor do I hold a degree in journalism. Mr. Levine is a journalist, and an accomplished one at that, so he should know better. After making the necessary corrections to the blog posting in question, I inquired about the errors left behind by Mr. Levine, to which he responded by re-writing his initial comment, which reads as follows, and I quote: "Grammar: it's should read its. Both nature magazine and the New York Times have plenty of rebuttals to Loeb's claims. Pardon my typographical errors due to using a voice app. But I'm not going to bother change the capitalization errors. I try to have my headline spelled correctly in articles I publish, but nobody's perfect." So Mr. Levine is not willing to correct his own capitalization errors, "not going to bother" in his own words. I found the reworked comment very troubling.
When offering direct criticism of an individual, I take great pains to "get my ducks in a row" as the old saying goes. In this particular instance, the saying is quite appropriate. I am very grateful for the honest criticism of my grammatical errors provided by Mr. Levine, but his reticence to correct his own errors is quite revealing and downright disconcerting. If we cannot rely on journalists to provide us with accurate information and use the English language correctly along the way, then we have arrived at a disturbing point in our history. Very disturbing indeed.
I sincerely apologize to all my readers for my unfortunate writing errors, I will strive to hold myself to a higher standard moving forward.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
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