Just saw this in the services section, struck me as amusing, does the Sun need re-writing so teenagers can understand it? Can’t see it myself, not a lot of 'big' words found there, unless "Jordan and Peter Split" is to hard to understand? Quote I need someone to go to The Sun Newspaper (www.thesun.co.uk) website and pick 25 news stories fom a range of diffrent categories and rewrite them so thyat they are unique and so that they cn be undestood by chldren aged 11 to 18
Sad thing is journalists are taught to write at a 5th/6th grade level. In the USA, many (not all) kids today are beyond stupid. They can't even run the register at McDonald's right. And how freaking hard is it to count to 10 to make sure there are 10 McNuggets in the box? Not 7, not 8, not 9, 10 10 10 10.
Did somebody have a bad McDonald's run recently? lol As per the original question, here's how I see it. If they're too stupid to understand it, they probably wouldn't know what to do with it anyway (no matter how much you dumbed down the language).
I go there usually once per couple of months for the fries and McNuggets. And yeah, every time they mess something up. Why on God's green planet would I order McNuggets and NOT want dipping sauce? What am I, some sort of fast food masochist? Today, I went to KFC for some chicken. I'm at the counter and the girl (probably 17-20) brings it to me on a tray. I told her it's to go and she froze and just looked at me like a deer in headlights. After about 6-7 seconds, another guy jumps in, says "it's to go" and puts it in a bag for me. SERENITY NOW! SERENITY NOW! /end rant
lol Haven't had those in ages, but I never have sauce w/ my nuggets when I get them. I can't imagine I'm the only one out there. So there. The scary thing about your KFC chick is that people like her actually help to make decisions in this country. *sigh* So I don't know. With that in mind, maybe the news should be dumbed down a bit. I'm so torn. lol
Like President Obama, yeah, I know. Sad thing is she isn't an isolated incident. Stuff like that happens all the time. They should just dumb down all news by simply saying "um, like some stuff that like you don't know about happened today. American Idol is next." And then they can sign off. Problem solved.
Maybe the guy did his 'research' on writing without considering the fact that The Sun is already dumbed down enough. Any more dumbing down and soon, even 3-year-olds will be able to read that.
The Sun is a British tabloid aimed at an audience with a limited vocabulary, it's an equivalent of the New York Post. The journalists who write the stories for both 'papers aren't stupid, in fact they are pretty talented. They have to deliberately downscale their quite extensive vocabularies to suit their respective audiences.
I'm not sure why people associate "downscaled writing" with "stupid writers." Even writers for the National Enquirer (Aliens Abduct Oprah and Force Her to Lose 67 Pounds Overnight--Their Shocking Diet Revealed!) have to "sell" to the audience. The readers are a different story.
Not only do the writers at The Sun have to limit their vocabulary use, but the paper is also much harder to work for than most of the other tabloid newspapers in the UK. Frequently I would be presented with a wild story and told "300 words, 15 minutes", which quite obviously reduces creative freedom. Source: Working there.