Do you think that English is the native language of this CNN writer?

[Redstone]

Parse this sentence, from CNN's website today:

"That storm killed a married couple whose car was blown off the road and destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles, officials said."

Huh?

Redstone

[aden_nak]

1. In journalism you paraphrase when the actual quote is worded poorly.

I can't even imagine what he was working off of, there.

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

2. Is Bush doing a bit of moonlighting?

[Marie26]

3. Sadly, yes. nt

[durtee librul]

4. Lately CNN crawl at the bottom of the screen

has been just terrible. I don't know who is writing the stuff, but they didn't get out of 6th grade, if that. Hmmmmm, must be Karen Hughes hard at work to write something understandable for dimson. OR it is just someone they hired away from FAUX news.

[Marie26]

14. It's all pretty terrible

As a former copy editor, this stuff just makes me wince. A lot of people just don't know how to write anymore. Cable news has a lot of grammatical errors; I think it's because they hire "TV Broadcast" majors instead of journalism/English majors.

[kestrel91316]

18. Literacy is SOOOOOO passe.

It continually galls me that I seem to be able to spell and write 1000% better than the vast majority of so-called journalists these days...........sigh.

I'm a veterinarian, for crying out loud. I took the bare minimum of English the whole way through school..........

[question everything]

5. Be fair. It happens to many of us on occasions.

You change one word and forget the other.

I suspect that originally the sentence was:

..married couple whose car was blown off the road, destroying homes..

later, s/he decided to add the "and" between the words "road" and "destroying" probably under a deadline, too.

[Redstone]

7. But we don't get paid to write news articles. That person does.

It's inexcusable. And don't they have, maybe, ONE editor who at least glances at this stuff before it gets opsted to the website?

Redstone

[valerief]

11. Yes, yes, yes. If they get paid for writing propaganda and tragedy news,

they should at least use correct spelling and grammar.

[Cleita]

6. Should it be?

"That storm killed a married couple whose car was blown off the road, and destroyed homes along a path of more than 20 miles," officials said.

Either the writer's English is not his first language, or it's a freeper intern, who recently graduated from Bob Jones U.

[Redstone]

8. Almost perfect; just drop the comma after "couple."

I'm sure that's what the writer meant to write. There used to be people called editors whose job it was to catch that kind of error before it got printed.

Redstone

[Cleita]

9. Done.

When I was in high school we used to separate all phrases with commas that could be eliminated from a sentence and still have a complete sentence without them. I know that somewhere the rules got changed and I got confused.

[valerief]

10. Outsourced.

[MiniMe]

12. The car destroyed houses? He should try proofreading!

Edited because I didn't proofread. LOL

[kansasblue]

13. how about....

Was..."That storm killed a married couple whose car was blown off the road and destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles, officials said."



me.."The storm killed a married couple when their car was blown off the road and destroyed homes along a 20 mile path, officials said"

[alcibiades_mystery]

15. Breakdown in parallel structure

As a few people have pointed out, "destroying" should be "destroyed."

Here's the ditributed element: That storm

Here are the parallel elements:

killed a married couple whose car was blown off the road
destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles

Obviously, the parallel elements fail, since the second can't be reconstituted with the distributed element:

"That storm destroying homes along a path of more than 20 miles."

[EFerrari]

16. Yes, because those of us who learned English late

are more aware of our goofs and our subordinate clauses.

:(

[Swede]

17. It are?

His grammar is atrocious.