Analysis of Grammatical Errors in Nigerian Newspapers: The Examples of the Tide Newspapers

Abstract

This paper examined the grammatical blunders in Nigerian Newspapers drawing its data from the Nigerian Tide Newspaper. It is anchored on the Error Analysis Theory (EAT). This study adopted the content analysis design which involves the examination of the manifest content of the Tide Newspaper. All the online and offline versions of the Tide Newspaper published within the month of August 2023 constituted the population of the study. But the data for this study were gathered from the twelve (12) offline version of newspaper published within the said month (August 2023). This study observed few tense errors in some of the newspapers. It was also noticed that punctuation errors were more that the sentence errors. Another dominate error observed is wrong capitalisations which is as a result of the in-house style of the newspaper. The initial letters of function words (closed class) were written in capital letters in the headlines of the newspaper. It was further observed that some words were either misspelt or misused in the newspaper. It was recommended that the management and editors of the Nigerian Tide Newspaper should modify their in-house style to reflect the convention of writing function words with small letters in the title of an essay.