Prisa needs gatekeeping

YOUR critical analysis of the remarkable self-advertising press statement to Verve from JC Public Relations (“whom recently opened in January 2012”) refers.

It is, as you rightfully say, thoroughly awful. However, I believe that it would be wrong to pursue a vengeful Jeremy Clarkson-style punishment, ie that the writer should be shot by a firing squad in front of her family for causing such grievous harm to the English language, not to mention grave insult to Independent Newspapers – however justly deserved that punishment may be.

In my brief comments below I promise to resist such expressions as crude, puerile, egregious, chaotic, grammatically shambolic, nonsensical jabbering etc which splutter from the lips on reading the first line, and continue to the statement’s sad ending.

It was surely not – could not have been – the work of an educated person writing in their first language. Or even their second.

But why write the article at all? What was its purpose?

“What beats a company to be at its best?” This egregiously meaningless (so I lied!) opening statement sets the scene for the nearorgasmic chaos (ha! lied again!) which follows.

PS: A final question – this one for the Public Relations Institute of SA (Prisa): does membership of the body require no language or grammar-based qualifications at all?

Interested professional

(name supplied)