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Good writing is hard work. You cannot cut corners if you want to write something clean and readable.

Every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every punctuation mark has to be checked properly. The words you think of and put on paper or on screen have to be organised. They are very easy to utter, but once you start to write them, you must be ready for some heavy lifting.

You will need commas, colons/semicolons, dashes, hyphens, question marks, periods/full stops—none of which is required in speech.

And you have to use them properly. If you do not, you will still be understood, but you will create a bad impression, especially if you are a professional expected to write clearly and accurately.

For things such as blogs, emails, social media posts, you will always be your own editor. You can use AI chatbots—but some social media platforms do not have in-built AI chatbots handling grammar.

That means you need to edit something somewhere and then paste it in the text field, something many people do not want to do because it is time-consuming.

Editing means double checking your work, reading it aloud—generally going the extra mile to ensure everything is as it should be before you hit the “send”, “share” or “publish” button. 

When you fail, you get what you see in the screenshots below.

The writer of the social media posts is NBS’s senior prime news anchor, Samson Kasumba. But it looks like he is moving from prime news presenting to making prime errors. His seniority is not reflected in his social media posts.

And that is a problem for a professional. While news anchors’ skills have little to do with writing, sloppy writing can undermine trust and authority, especially for a senior journalist. 

Mr Kasumba would struggle to convince proper professionals looking at these screenshots that he takes trouble to double check what he broadcasts. If he can write sloppily on a platform he uses to tell the world who he is—and where his employer’s name is displayed for all to see—why would he care about verifying a small fact in a story?

Media personalities are role models for language use in society. Mr Kasumba should be doing better. It seems he gets away with his sloppiness largely because his followers do not care. If they were calling out his sloppiness, if they expected higher standards, he would probably be forced to get his act together.

The problem is not that his English is awkward. It is his shocking inability to check what he has to post. He should be alert to basic, well-known errors—such as “write” vs “right”, “many” vs “may”—that any professional communicator must avoid.

Even in Luganda, his native language, he does make spelling mistakes. The last screenshot, for example, has the word kekomberera spelt kekomberela.

Mr Kasumba’s posts reflect more than professional laziness. They signal a disregard for the standards that give journalism its credibility. Proofreading is a necessity, especially for public figures who are, by default, seen as language custodians.

Sloppy writing does not just make the writer look bad; it makes the profession look unserious. And that is something journalism in Uganda cannot afford.

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