Every morning on my commute to work, I read Toronto’s edition of the Metro newspaper. Spoiler alert: I am in Toronto. And sometimes they confuse me…
Ok, nobody’s perfect and a mistake here or there is no big deal. But it also depends on the kind of mistake. I am not talking about grammar here. I am talking about those situations that could be solved with somebody reading the text twice. And they don’t always do at Metro Toronto. Here are two examples from last week.
The Queen 501 streetcar will be closed all summer and Metro shows the alternatives to the popular line. However, Metro guys can’t tell a bike, a bus and a helicopter apart. You’d think it’s easy; probably because it is. In the image below you can see that the text about buses (top right) is connected to the bicycle (green line), the joke about taking a helicopter (bottom right) is linked to the bus (yellow line) and a series of dots associate the bikes alternative with a helicopter (bottom centre).
Fortunately, articles don’t always disagree with themselves. Sometimes Metro journalists are so sure about what they write that they write it twice. See the following image on the right, where two paragrafs are repeated for absolutely no reason.