Magic Toothpaste

I've always looked forward to the day I would go out and buy the latest issue of TopGear, after which I would read it on the way home and then read it some more until my mother told me it was time for dinner. The reason for this is that I have been, and still am, a huge fan of things on four or more wheels since I first knew what a car looked like. However, the reason I've chosen the aforementioned motoring magazine over the countless others available is because I've developed a taste for that exclusively English blend of witty writing containing plenty of dry humour, properties that provide genuine reading pleasure, if I may.

Unfortunately, the BBC decided that each significant portion of the world would have its very own version of the magazine, and so TopGear Malaysia was born. This had the nasty side effect of having our local motoring journalists writing for the magazine, which wouldn't be a problem at all if they actually knew how to write. I experienced some very nasty palpitations the first few times I read the articles written by these amateurs and have since then tried my very best to avoid their reviews.

I shall justify my stand by using a review about the new and very sexy BMW 640i coupe as an example. Now you should bear in mind that all this was written by the editor of TopGear Malaysia, a position that makes his literary blunders all the more intolerable.

One of the things that makes the articles by the original UK journalists so appealing is that there is a certain flair to their writing that is glaringly absent in those written by their Malaysian counterparts. The proper way to write something like this is to make sure everything comes together nicely, but in this article it's like as though our editor decided to make a list of the things he'd want in the review and went 'All right I shall write this first, and then this and then that', which really isn't the way to go about as a journalist for TopGear. This had the unintended effect of making some of his sentences seem rather mechanical. The only way you'd properly understand what I'm saying would be to read the whole thing yourself.

Of course, this being an English magazine, the writer tried to be as English as possible in his style of writing. However, this didn't quite work and his failure is especially evident in the first two paragraphs of the article. The thing with this sort of writing is that you either do it properly or you don't do it at all, and you can see how his miserable attempts would detract from the joy of reading such an article.

There are also quite a number other miscellaneous stylistic errors that make this article less than a joy to read, one of which being the somewhat cliché manner the editor writes certain things. For example: 'The rear seats are great as long as you are not taller than DC (DC being the editor's initials). An interesting point to note: If in the future you happen to purchase a red 640i coupé, and you find a little indent on the ceiling/roof,then...”DC was here”.' Nobody writes like this any more! There was also a sentence where he put words probably meant as sarcasm in inverted comas: 'We only got to test the “humble” 640i with “puny” numbers like 450Nm from 1300 – 4500rpm.' Really? Then there are the instances when he tries to fit too many things in a single sentence, resulting in a difficulty understanding said sentence without having to read it over and over again.

However, the worst sin committed in the writing of this review would be the appalling grammatical errors that so obviously show themselves even when one is merely skimming through the pages. Even then, this article isn't the worst I've seen as just last month another review written by the same person contained a rather alarming number of such errors. Of course these mistakes could merely be typos, but then this just shows that the lazy bastards never bothered proof-reading their work but then again, typos are mainly spelling blunders and not the screwing up of an entire sentence. This, I would say, is the main reason why I don't read the things written by our local reviewers any more.