A comma catastrophe

In April 2004, in response to the Madrid train bombs, this poster appeared on the London underground.

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The message for people who see a suspicious package is

Don’t touch, check with other passengers, inform station staff or call 999

(999 is the emergency phone number in the UK)

The mistake screams out to those who have any understanding of punctuation. It is a typical garden path sentence; it misleads you as you read it. In some online discussions the point has been made that the message was clear so what was the fuss about? That misses the point. The sentence is not immediately comprehensible and, while such incomprehensibility will not in itself threaten public safety in the slightest, it is annoying because it impedes the instantaneous decoding of the message that is the desired end of any efficient communication. The failure to construct the sentence properly leads to confusion and annoyance on the part of people who read it. These reactions may be small in scale and fleeting in effect, but they are nonetheless real. The nature of good communication is that it gets the message across without delay and with the minimum of effort from the person who receives it. If it does not achieve that goal, the failure to communicate well lies in the sender, not the recipient, of the communication (all other things being equal).

Comments

[Laura Forryan]

The comma is constantly misused. This is another great example of how grammatical mistakes cause problems. It is not too much to ask that the grammar is perfect in posters such as these. Thank you for yet another interesting article.