Judging by the comments from my last post, only a third of my readers will stop reading an article if the writer employs bad grammar or punctuation. The other two-thirds might judge the writer or criticize him or her, but will continue to read.
Following that, I just have to wonder what you all think of this piece of writing. The link is to Sarah Palin’s speech announcing that she’s resigning as Governor of Alaska. I’ve been meaning to write about it for days, but the flu has kept me from it. I must thank my dear friend Brendan for pointing out what a tragedy of the English language it is. (If you enjoyed the SNL Tina Fey skits from the election, please go read the speech in its entirety. I don’t think any comedy was intended, but it sure is easy to find in it.)
Sarah Palin gave this speech as governor. She has a college degree, a staff who could have written for this her, and what I can only assume is access to several proofreaders. Yet we end up with many sections like this:
“Alaska’s mission – to contribute to America. We’re strategic in the world as the air crossroads of the world, as a gatekeeper of the continent. Bold visionaries knew this – Alaska would be part of America’s great destiny.
Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas. It’s energy! God gave us energy.”
Yes, God gave us energy. And man gave us grammatical rules and tools. But Gov. Palin gave us sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and superfluous punctuation marks. Right here, in the following two sentences, she shows a blazing disregard for verbs: ”Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and oil and gas.”
I won’t go into how ridiculous I think her argument is that staying in office her full term would be just “politics as usual.” I promise. It’s killing me, of course, but I don’t want to distract from the blatantly bad writing that is her resignation speech. It’s just bad writing, people. I started to get out my red pen and my Google Docs to share some fun with you, but I didn’t have the strength. Where would I even start? Would it just be editing to correct for punctuation errors? That would take a while. Then there would be the lack of subjects and predicates in any logical relation to each other. Or would I try to get into style? I couldn’t get into style, of course. I am too far away from her politics and mindset to try to give her style tips.
I realize, of course, that this is the transcript of a speech, and some politicians take artistic license with speeches. But what artistic value is served in the next sentence? “So much success in this first term – and with this success I am proud to take credit… for hiring the right people!” Why the dash? Why the ellipses? And even if it is a speech transcript, it’s posted on the State of Alaska’s website. Doesn’t that deserve proofreading?
I don’t have a lot of points I’m trying to make here. I’m just trying to say that our elected officials should pay attention to the elementary grammar rules we were all taught in grade school. Is that asking so much?
