One of my readers messaged me a complaint about my use, or lack of use, of capital letters in my blog. The simple answer is, that he might be out of touch with the trend in writing English of gradually doing away with capital letters that serve no purpose in communication. Our ability to communicate should never be locked in the past.
For example, we know that Doug Ford is premier of Ontario. That sentence contained three proper names. They were capitalized. The word premier did not need to be capitalized. And I don’t bother to say he is the Honourable. He isn’t and I don’t live in the past. It is the same that I don’t need to capitalize the word city when talking about Toronto. Yet, I think we will still be capitalizing proper names for some time to come.
And Considering the Collective.
While we are on this subject, I must apologize for accidently posting two blogs on the same day in the Progressive Bloggers collective. I have always felt that posting multiple blogs on the same day is an abuse of being included in the collective.
But it also got me a heads up from Google Analytics that something was wrong in my stats. Since about a third of my readers come through the collective, I try to make a useful contribution every day. The only problem is that those readers do not have the same easy access to the 12 years of blogs (4600 posts) on political subjects that might be of interest. These archives are more readily available through babelonthebay.com .
And the Numbers Game.
Back in my newspaper days, I paid close attention to the Starch organization’s statistics on editorial readership and the separate figures on advertising. What became clear when going through those studies was that circulation figures for the newspaper are only that. Readers of editorial content within the newspaper are separate figures and readership of a particular article is another figure entirely. And then there were three separate levels of attention. The last column was headed ‘Read Most’ and that told the story. It puzzles me that to-day a skilled writer such as Rosie DiManno in the Toronto Star can sum up a column in the first five words (such as: “Harry and Meghan are…irrelevant.) and then continue for another 3000 or more words that just might also be irrelevant.
-30-
Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
Complaints, comments, criticisms and compliments can be sent to: