Impeccable texts, well written and without spelling or grammatical errors. This is what, logically, readers of La Vanguardia expect when they get ready to leaf through the newspaper or consult it in the digital edition. Subscriber Lluís Salvador, however, wrote to us this week to warn: "Too often, reading his articles, many misspellings and disconnected sentences appear". His impression is that we don't give these mistakes the importance they deserve because we believe that "after all, [articles] read quickly and the reader doesn't seem to notice." "I regret to tell them - he adds - that we do realize it and that those of us who are old enough, when we read certain articles, our teeth grind."
Like him, another reader recently wrote developing this same complaint: "Years ago it was practically impossible to find spelling mistakes in an article. But nowadays you find so many of them in all the digital newspapers that it even hurts the eyes". And he added: "If I wrote a text, before sending it I would look at it a thousand times, and much more if I know that so many people will read it". In recent days, readers Andreas Manz, Amaya Garraga and Antoni Godino have also sent messages to warn of mistakes or typographical errors that they have detected and took advantage of to ask for more attention.
From these messages and others received over time on this topic, I think the vast majority of readers understand that some error is inevitable in a printed newspaper that is written from scratch every day and in a digital edition in constant rewrite. But they rightly claim that these errors are occasional.
Certainly, the demand in this sense on all fronts of the newspaper – from the journalist who writes the first version of the news to the following stages of review – must be maximum, since the correctness, quality and linguistic precision they are one of our first letters of introduction as a means of quality communication.
It is no coincidence that the first chapter of La Vanguardia's Editorial Book begins with 18 guidelines that establish the importance of the language that must be used in the newspaper and that remain valid despite the changes in the profession and the habits of the readers that the digital revolution and the acceleration of information imply.
