• Ghoelian@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month ago

    Ok maybe a very stupid question but

    The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced

    Isn’t that gramatically incorrect? Shouldn’t it be “The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday”?

    I see this kind of writing a lot in news articles so surely it’s not actually wrong, but that’s not how I was taught English writing.

    • loppy@fedia.io
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      1 month ago

      Idk if you’re a native speaker or not, but as a native speaker of American English there is absolutely nothing wrong with this to me. You could put it in about 4 different places:

      On Thursday the press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____.

      The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders on Thursday announced ____.

      The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced on Thursday that ____.

      The press freedom group Reporters Without Borders announced ____ on Thursday.

      The first one typically has a comma after “Thursday”. The second one you could offset “on Thursday” with commas. The third one is at best really awkward without a “that” or a question word (who, what, where, why, how) and you could offset “on Thursday” with commas; you can also drop the “on”, in which case you can’t use commas. The last one is possible but could be ambiguous (it could be that “on Thursday” is part of their announcement).

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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      1 month ago

      It’s correct, as much as any English is correct, but not typically spoken naturally like that.

      The press (newspapers) has an idiosyncratic grammar, probably born of maximising space in a newspaper column. Headlines are often grammatical nightmares, body copy less so.

      One could think of it as a form of semantic compression.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 month ago

        A good example of this is their insistence on using the comma, to mean “the”, “of” or “and”, leading to some bizarre headlines.

        Midland, Baker, Roz, Mazda, convicted, fraud

        Which despite the fact it just sounds like a list of random words, is in fact a valid sentence. Or at least it represents one.