Saturday, September 09, 2017

journalists need to learn how to write

O journalists: please stop writing sentences like this:

Compared with people who ate the lowest 20 percent of carbohydrates, those who ate the highest 20 percent had a 28 percent increased risk of death.

Sorry, but all humans labor under a 100% chance of death. Perhaps you meant "early death," but that only raises the question of what is meant by "early." For the love of Cthulhu, try to be precise in what you mean, especially when writing about science.



3 comments:

TheBigHenry said...

Most journalists can't write coherently about science because they don't think like scientists. Moreover, they can't write coherently about anything because they don't think.

Kevin Kim said...

All is lost, then. The only thing left to do is to point and laugh.

TheBigHenry said...

Or cry.