Phoning it in

Now that the good editors at Yahoo! Shine have corrected the teaser to an article on teenage daughters and talking to boys on the phone (reported here on Terribly Write), it’s time to look at the article itself.

Could it really be that the first sentence contains not one, but two, typos?

I think the writer meant “when I started talking” (unless I’m mistaken and she took on the phone the way a wrestler takes on an opponent in the ring). And that sentence containing those typos should have stopped with class. (The parenthetical sentences contain their own ending punctuation.)

The daughter mentioned in the next paragraph must have been a very, very young mom because she’s “overwhelmed by how fast her kids are growing up.”

 

It would make more sense if the girl’s mother were the one who’s overwhelmed. Yeah, that’s it. Let’s just call this a dangling modifier because the noun it modifies (Teresa A) is missing from the sentence. Nice one. A little comma after the word is would be helpful, and it would be consistent with that rule about commas and conjunctions separating independent clauses — the kind of stuff only high-school English teachers, grammarians, editors, and careful writers fuss about.

Finally, there’s the use of than instead of then and the superfluous the in the closing paragraph:

Do you think that the writer reread this before publishing it, or was it just phoned in?

Hold the hyphens in my cuppa

I like my cup of tea with a little sugar and a squeeze of lemon, but please hold the hyphens. The writer for this Yahoo! Developer Network blog feels otherwise:

I guess I’m just one of those people oolong for the good ol’ days when spelling mattered.

Boys, stop calling this mama

When boys call this mama, she feels there should be rules put in place, according to Yahoo! Shine:

The real problem isn’t the boys. The problem is a missing word — daughter. The mother in question wants to know which rules to put in place when boys call her daughter. It’s the perfect example of how a careless omission can change the meaning of a sentence.

The perfect typo

I hope it’s merely a typo — and not a misspelling – on Yahoo! Shine:

HIV, The New York Times, and swarms of condoms

I admit that I couldn’t follow the logic in this Yahoo! Shine blog post on the somber subject of HIV. Maybe I lost my motivation to concentrate when I read the first sentence:

“The Gray Lady,” The New York Times, likes its name spelled with four capitalized words. Ah, well. I continued on to the next sentence. It may seem counterintuitive, but when I see a word containing a gratuitous hyphen, my trust in the accuracy of the content fades, and my mind begins to wander.

I think my brain continued to drift until I reached the paragraph about 80- and 90-degree weather. I snapped to attention. Huh? The “temperatures” in question were really decades, without the apostrophes that signal an omission. They should be ’80s and ’90s.

I persevered until I encountered this sentence that reminded me why sentences written for the Web should be short:

It also reminded me that some writers and editors still don’t know where a question mark goes when a sentence ends with a quotation mark. 

Finally, I met an error that truly grabbed my attention:

I’ve been hoarding that gaffe for more than a day, just waiting until the vision of swarming condoms dissipated.

McCain, Palin and serious errors

When tackling a serious subject, every writer wants to be taken seriously. But errors of any kind can do some serious damage to a writer’s credibility. Take this paragraph from a Yahoo! Shine article on Sen. McCain’s announcement of his running mate:

Here are the worst offenders in that single paragraph:

• “Presidential hopeful” doesn’t need a hyphen, and John McCain doesn’t need the commas surrounding his name.
• Do you suppose the writer meant that Sen. McCain would be the oldest president to enter the office? Or just any office?
• The word supports should be supporters. 
• Gov. Palin, if elected, wouldn’t be “acting as Vice President,” she’d be the vice president, without the caps.
• Finally, stating that she is “the first female running on the Republican presidential ticket” implies she’ll be replaced after she’s nominated by another female. I think she’ll actually be the first female on a Republican presidential ticket.

I probably missed other errors. If so, leave a reply. Seriously.

Tabasco would be hotter

Tabasco is probably spicier than Tobasco, which sounds like a combination of a hot-pepper sauce and a smoking product. Thanks to Yahoo! Shine for my first laugh of the day:

Tabasco. That’s hot.

Hyphens: Making a split

There must be something about the hyphen that is so alluring that writers want to insert it where it doesn’t belong, like this example from Yahoo! Shine:

Inserting a hyphen in an already oversized word all the while ignoring the conventions of English, this article continues with this absolute nonsensical sentence:

I’m guessing here, but I think the writer meant: Like all good things of television old, the Banana Splits are being brought back to the tube.

Finally, there’s that hyphen again creating another split:

Corniness is a perfectly fine word, which (when spelled correctly) is hyphenless. And the repeated the is obviously a typo that writers who reread their work would spot and correct.

What sound does a byte make?

I thought they were rather quiet, actually. But the writer of this Yahoo! Shine teaser may have been listening more intently than I to the eight bits that form a byte:

If you lean in real close to your computer, maybe you can hear a sound byte, too.

Achy breaky thumbs

If Billy Ray Cyrus can spell it correctly, the writers at Yahoo! Shine should be able to: