AFTER 25 years as a journalist, when it comes to grammar, punctuation and spelling I’m a nitpicker.

Before you start shouting that newspapers these days are full of mistakes, let me tell you this.

News organisations have and always will work at a rapid pace. It is the nature of the industry.

That means mistakes creep in inevitably during the news-gathering and production process.

Many of these mistakes are picked up before they are published, naturally. But sometimes a fresh error is unwittingly introduced while correcting an earlier mistake.

A common cry I’ve heard over the years is: ‘Do you not have people checking your stories?’ In the old days newspapers had armies of proof readers to iron out the gaffes, and even then mistakes would still slip through.

Several pairs of eyes would have scanned the column inches of text, yet that niggling literal would still hide away, sneakily waiting to leap out of the page like a jack-in-the-box once the press had stopped.

These days the role of sub-editor has largely been eliminated. Reporters are now expected to research, write, edit and put stories on the pages themselves. Oh and take the photographs, too. All the while keeping an eye on their busy social media accounts.

Doing all that and still meeting multiple deadlines each day means one or two hiccups creep into the news production process.

It was ever thus and I’m sure it will always be so.

It always amused me when I was an editor to receive letters from readers criticising journalists over things like grammar and punctuation.

The letter writers may well have had a point – and I would acknowledge so in reply – but I would often find errors of spelling, punctuation and grammar in their letters. Let he who is without sin...

It might have been an incorrectly used word, such as ‘I would like to see less mistakes in your paper’. By which they really meant ‘fewer mistakes’.

The older we get the more rose-tinted our view is of our own education. You believe what you learned in spelling, grammar and punctuation was superior to what today’s children are taught.

Yet when I look at my children’s homework, nothing could be further from the truth. Modal verbs anyone?

These days I teach journalism to university students, so my pedantry is put to good use. But I’m constantly made aware of my own shortcomings. I often know how to use the tools without actually knowing the name of the grammatical ‘hammer’ or punctuation ‘saw’ I’m wielding.

And if you happen to find a mistake in this column, then send your comments to the editor, not me.