READING

I commend Stephens on his excellent article. I am appalled by the paucity of language today and the “and stuff” and “you know what I mean” phrases that punctuate most everyone’s conversation. These meaningless words reflect a lack of vocabulary and ability to orally communicate, and translate into even poorer writing skills.

Although the content of the article was laudable, I found the printed page to be visually distracting. The use of bullets, the center boldface headlines and symbols, and the extra white space between lines made the article extremely difficult to follow. The sidebar article was also annoying. Perhaps your staff needs to put away their computer toys and make more simple, easy-to-read presentations. The visual page was MTV; the article was PBS. Let’s not contribute to the death of reading by designing a cluttered, disorienting page.

PATRICIA K. DUFFIE

Placentia