Here it is again. Sigh

Sigh. First it was spotted on the home page of Yahoo! Shine. Now it appears elsewhere on Shine:

Why is this word so hard to get right?

A 16-day space mission lasts 16 days

A hyphen has landed on the Yahoo! front page where it doesn’t belong:

If you’re writing about a 16-day mission, give it a hyphen. But if you’re writing about 16 days? Not so much.

What do the pope and the queen have in common?

They both appear on the Yahoo! front page here:

and here:

And they are both capitalized. Unfortunately, if you follow the Associated Press style (as Yahoo! does), they shouldn’t be — unless they are followed by a name, like Pope Benedict XVI and Queen Elizabeth.

Hairstyle to dress: Your shape is fabulous!

Until a hairstyle can pay a compliment to a dress’ shape, this little tidbit from “The Thread” on Yahoo! Shine is wrong, wrong, wrong:

The wrong word (compliment instead of the correct complement) isn’t the only problem. If you follow the Associated Press style (as Yahoo! supposedly does), the possessive of dress is without the extra S because the word following it begins with an S. (I am not making this up.) And anyone with a second-grade education could spot the misspelled until.

You’d think that in a short blog post, there couldn’t possibly be more errors. You are wrong! Here are two more:

If you’re unsure whether collarbone is one word or two (it’s one), try using clavicle. (Ha! Ha! Like the writer could actually spell that!) And unless you mean “additional long hair,” you need a hyphen in the compound adjective extra-long.

Maybe you shouldn’t rely on an editor

I was wrong. I’ve always advocated that anything written by a professional writer should also be edited by a professional editor. It’s one way to avoid embarrassing typos like this from Yahoo! Shine:

But then I read this editor’s note at the end of the blog post:

If you can’t trust an editor to know the difference between the contraction it’s and the possessive pronoun its, who can you trust? Certainly not the editors of Shine.

Shining the spotlight on your mistakes

It’s nigh impossible to hide your flaws when you publish them in big fat letters. Like this goof on the home page of Yahoo! Shine:

Totebag? Tote bag?

Can’t figure out if it should be one word or two? Can’t take the time to consult a dictionary? Then use them both! That seems to be the philosophy at Yahoo! Shopping:

For additional time-savings, omit the hyphens and opt for quicker-to-type spaces in the modifier back-to-school.

Seeing double. Seeing double

Readers will be seeing double on Yahoo! TV:

and Yahoo! Shine:

So you think you can spell

If you write for Yahoo! TV, then spelling is sometimes a challenge for you:   

“So You Think You Can Dance” contestant Janette Manrara is just one person whose name has been misspelled by Yahoo! writers.

Does no one who edited this thing think?

This has got to be one of the more awkwardly worded and grammatically incorrect sentences I’ve ever read:

Does no one who works on Yahoo! Shine proofread or edit anymore?