this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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Ok maybe a very stupid question but
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.
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.
A good example of this is their insistence on using the comma, to mean "the", "of" or "and", leading to some bizarre headlines.
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.
Though today we get: