This ad has been running on the back of Kroger brand corn flakes for some time now. While Kroger properly placed a period at the close of the first sentence of its ad copy, it could not find the question marks required for the three clauses it offered to end the second sentence. And while Kroger did an admirable job of maintaining subject-verb agreement for the first two of those clauses, it just couldn't keep it up through to the bitter end. Eating smart does not, apparently, lead to writing smart.
2 comments:
Pastor: I've never posted on a blog before, so I'm not sure if it's in good form or not to directly address the author. In any event, because I think I have the same interest in our language as you, I'd like to share the following quote from Edward Tufte (Beautiful Evidence, 2006). He was primarily writing about the "pitch culture" of PowerPoint users, but I think it also applies to the point you were making in your post:
"Lists have diverse architectures: elaborately ordered to disordered, linearly sequential to drifting in 2-space, and highly-calibrated hierarchies of typographic dingbats to free-wheeling dingbat dingbats. In the construction of lists, a certain convenience derives from their lack of syntactic and intellectual discipline as each element simply consists of scattered words in fragmented pre-sentence grunts."
If I knew you better, I'd make a joke now by asking how a kind and loving God could allow ad copywriters to exist. But I don't, so I won't.
I enjoy your posts. Please keep them coming.
I'm still keeping advertising copywriter as a fallback career option. I just hope the field will be taken back by English majors who picked up a thing or two about grammar before moving on to deconstructionism.
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