Is there an intelligence test TV writers have to fail?

[Jim]

Hi,

Writers do also have to take their target audience into account (I often had to dumb things down when I was writing for community newspapers). Though in this case, I think you're probably correct in assuming the writer just did a bad job.

Yes, I know. I took journalism in high school and worked on the school paper. As a photographer, but I still had to turn in the occasional article. Given that 'exterminate' and 'decimate' are both complex Latinate words, either would be red penciled and replaced with 'wiped out' (as you suggest below).

I don't really think exterminate would have been better however. It has too many connotations of being a deliberate act . . .

Thus making it even more appropriate in this context. The plague was intentionally started as an act of war. It was, indeed, an intentional extermination.

--Pete

Hi,

Please allow me to apologize for my cut & paste, I can not express myself as well as Petewiki, that's why lenny has to dumb down his newsletters for me.

This whole debate is about "Artistic license" decimate was correctly used. Today on Meet the Press decimate was expressed at the roundtable by a New York Times writer Tom Friedman, he could have used "Destroy" but the meaning would still have been the same.

Artistic license (also known as dramatic license, historical license, poetic license, narrative license, licentia poetica, or simply license) is a colloquial term, sometime euphemism, used to denote the distortion of fact, alteration of the conventions of grammar or language, or rewording of pre-existing text made by an artist to improve a piece of art.

For example, if a visual artist decided it was more artistically desirable to portray St. Paul's Cathedral next to the Houses of Parliament in a scene of London, even though in reality they are not close together, that would be artistic license.

The artistic license may also refer to the ability of an artist to apply smaller distortions, such as a poet ignoring some of the minor requirements of grammar for poetic effect.[1] For example, Mark Antony's "Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears" from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar would technically require the word "and" before "countrymen", but the conjunction "and" is omitted to preserve the rhythm of iambic pentameter (the resulting conjunction is called an asyndetic tricolon). Conversely, on the next line, the end of "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him" has an extra syllable because omitting the word "him" would make the sentence unclear, but adding a syllable at the end would not disrupt the meter.[2] Both of these are examples of artistic license.

In summary, artistic license is:
*Entirely at the artist's discretion.
*Intended to be tolerated by the viewer (cf. "willing suspension of disbelief")[3]
*Useful for filling in gaps, whether they be factual, compositional, historical or other gaps[4]
*Used consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or unintentionally or in tandem[5]

Critical voices are sometimes raised when artistic license is applied to cinematic and other depictions of real historical events. While slight manipulation for dramatic effect of chronology and character traits are generally accepted, some critics feel that depictions that present a significantly altered reality are irresponsible, particularly because many viewers and readers do not know the actual events and may thus take the dramatized depiction to be true to reality. Examples of films and television series criticized for excessive use of dramatic license include Oliver Stone's Alexander, the HBO series Rome and Showtimes' The Tudors.

Writers adapting a work for another medium (e.g., a film screenplay from a book) often make significant changes, additions to, or omissions from the original plot in the book, on the grounds that these changes were necessary to make a good film.[9] These changes are sometimes to the dismay of fans of the original work.

edit in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artistic_license