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How to make yourself look unprofessional

by aaron on June 11th, 2007

I was just reading a truly bizarre (yet oddly heartwarming) story on MSNBC about how a deaf mother dolphin and her newborn calf are getting along at a marine mammal rehabilitation center in the Florida Keys, but I was terribly disheartened to discover the lack of proofing present in a few paragraphs:

Officials hope the calf will develop communications’ skills by speaking to dolphins at Dolphins Plus when the system is fully turned on soon.

Mother, calif will not be released
Mother and calf are to remain at the Conservancy for at least six months before relocating to a more permanent facility. Castaway can’t be released because a dolphin needs to hear to utilize echo localization, or dolphin sonar, to survive.

Oh. My. God. This is an AP newswire story, too, which has traditionally meant (to me at least) that it would meet certain standards of quality. Evidently not. I think the author(s) would be well-served to spend some time reading Matthew Stibbe’s blog.

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  • Will Pearson

    Wow, that is bad. I had a look around the web and found other articles for this story citing AP but couldn’t find the same mistakes. Some of that writing really loses the semantics that the author was trying to get across, and as a reader I had to rely on pragmatics, or a knowledge of the context of the article, to attempt to guess the intended meaning. It’s pretty shocking miscommunication.

    For anyone who is interested National Geographic seem to have covered the same Dolphin story here:
    http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070425-deaf-dolphin.html

    It is a great story. I remember reading an article in Nature Neuroscience a few years ago that reported that the plasticity of the human brain makes it easier to learn language before the age of something like four, five, or six. I don’t know whether this is the same in Dolphins but if it is then this “chat line” could really be helpful in promoting the calf’s acquisition of language.

  • http://brethorsting.com aaron

    Interesting, thanks for including that link, Will! That’s much more insightful :smile:

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