Representative Campfield, Try Harder or Find an Editor

I don't want this to be a personal attack, so I'll start by commending Tennessee State Representative Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) for keeping a blog and for posting material that is sincere and frank. Campfield has been in the news lately for his insistence on joining the Tennessee Congressional Black Caucus and for including an allegedly racist website on his blogroll.

I won't call Representative Campfield is a racist; I'll stop at goober. But I'm worried that an elected official from a college town has such a poor grasp of the English language in its written form. This, for example, is an excerpt from his most recent blog post:

It was because I had a link to a sight that had a link to a site that quoted a black man who wrote for a black owned paper in a black run country about a thought he had that some call racist.

I use to play a game in the 7th or 8th grade called the 7 degrees of Kevin Bacon .The object of this game was to link by association any one in the world to movie star Kevin Bacon in 7 steps or less .It was fun and simple to do.

Any blogger will misspell the occasional word, forget a comma, add an extra comma, or confuse "insight" and "incite" now and then. And while I could get picky and point out that "7 steps or less" (above) should be "7 steps or fewer," or I could harp on the need for hyphens in the opening sentence (above), I'll focus on more fundamental problems. For one, I don't understand the spacing, or lack thereof, before and after periods. I can forgive accidentally writing "sight" instead of "site," but I don't understand how Representative Campfield can use "sight" (incorrect) and "site" (correct) in the same phrase ("I had a link to a sight that had a link to a site") without noticing the mistake.

Moreover, the game is called "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." Six, not seven. When it comes to pop culture references such as this, search engines offer bloggers a quick and easy tool for fact-checking.

Skimming through Representative Campfield's blog and his letters reveals several such blunders. Again, I'm glad to see an elected official be so open and candid, and I understand that all bloggers make mistakes, but someone serving as a state representative should be more careful and professional when making public statements.