Is it my imagination, or has the quality of written Chinese deteriorated over the years?
I see more misprints than ever before nowadays, whether it’s 再 when 在 should be used, 腳色 instead of 角色, or even 醞藏 instead of 蘊藏. Sentences with inexplicable reduplication like “我的的朋友” are common. And, as ever, there are the endless comma splices, sloppily constructed sentences and horrible use of redundancies and meaningless filler I’ve come to expect. Now I can sort of understand this kind of laziness and incompetence in essays written by college students who couldn’t care less, but I’m seeing this kind of sloppiness with increasing frequency in published print media such as magazine and newspaper articles and also non-fiction books, all supposedly edited by professionals.
Is it that my Chinese ability is improving so I’m more sensitive to such things? Was I pampered by reading well-written, professor-selected articles back when I was studying Chinese? Or is the quality of written Chinese dropping? And if so, what’s the cause?