Here’s an area that could use a real cleanup (or is it clean-up?) effort — the Yahoo! front page. It’s hard to believe that the editor who wrote this headline:
works for the same company as the person who wrote this:
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- Abbreviations (42)
- Attributions (3)
- Capitalizing (1067)
- Change of Person (10)
- Cliches (73)
- Confused Words (872)
- accept/except (3)
- ad/add (7)
- adieu/ado (2)
- adverse/averse (1)
- advice/advise (4)
- affect/effect (25)
- aid/aide (5)
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- already/all ready (2)
- alter/altar (6)
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- anecdote/antidote (2)
- appraise/apprise (1)
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- baited/bated (1)
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- canon/cannon (4)
- canvas/canvass (1)
- capital/capitol (11)
- carat/karat (5)
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- complement/compliment (21)
- complementary/complimentary (2)
- confidant/confidante (3)
- continuous/continual (3)
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- decent/descent (4)
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- desert/dessert (4)
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- dual/duel (1)
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- elicit/illicit (3)
- everyday/every day (27)
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- seen/scene (1)
- sew/sow (1)
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- tack/tact (3)
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- tenant/tenet (2)
- than/then (28)
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- their/there/they're (32)
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- throne/thrown (2)
- tic/tick (1)
- to/too/two (43)
- toe/tow (4)
- track/tract (1)
- vain/vein (2)
- vice/vise (1)
- waist/waste (3)
- wait/weight (1)
- waive/wave (3)
- wary/weary (1)
- way/weigh (2)
- weak/week (1)
- wear/where (3)
- wet/whet (1)
- whose/who's (26)
- wreak/wreck (4)
- your/you're (57)
- Conjunctions (29)
- Contractions (117)
- Correlative Conjunctions (55)
- both…and (13)
- either…or (15)
- neither…nor (15)
- not only…but also (12)
- Department of Redundancy Dept. (286)
- Errors of Fact (715)
- Grammar Myths (4)
- Jargon (1)
- Links (21)
- Metaphors (5)
- Missing Words (611)
- Misspellings (3410)
- Modifiers (233)
- Adjectives (150)
- Adverbs (49)
- Misplaced Modifiers (36)
- Numbers (44)
- Plurals (226)
- Possessives (387)
- Pronouns (224)
- Punctuation (1603)
- Apostrophes (614)
- Colons (14)
- Commas (250)
- Dashes (11)
- Exclamation Points (9)
- Hyphens (757)
- Parentheses (29)
- Periods (76)
- Question Marks (118)
- Quotation Marks (224)
- Semicolons (38)
- Subject-Verb Agreement (434)
- Titles (102)
- Uncategorized (392)
- Unnecessary Words (596)
- Verbs (571)
- Wrong words (1837)
Tags
apostrophe bad grammar bad spelling capitalization Commonly confused words editing extra word factual error factual errors funny writing errors funny writing mistakes grammar grammar errors grammar mistakes homophone homophones hyphen incorrect grammar incorrect punctuation incorrect spelling journalism missing punctuation missing word misspelled celebrities misspelling proofreading Punctuation punctuation errors punctuation mistakes Shine spelling spelling error spelling mistake typo typos unnecessary word verb writing wrong word Yahoo! Yahoo! front page Yahoo! Movies Yahoo! News Yahoo! Shine Yahoo! TV
Time to clean up your act
July 30, 2010 — Laura
Posted in Hyphens, Punctuation. Tags: clean-up, cleanup, consistency, editing, hyphen, inconsistency, journalism, proofreading, Punctuation, writing, Yahoo!, Yahoo! front page. 7 Comments »
7 Responses to “Time to clean up your act”
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July 30, 2010 at 11:25 am
What is going on with Yahoo!? Seriously. A mistake here and there is one thing, but this is more than a sprinkling! I think the eds over there need a boot camp. Or maybe just a boot ;P
Thanks for visiting my blog >> brittanymtaylor.wordpress.com! I’ll be adding yours to my reader!
July 30, 2010 at 12:12 pm
[...] the rest of this great post here Comments (0) Posted in BP News [...]
July 30, 2010 at 12:28 pm
[...] the rest of this great post here Comments (0) Posted in Oil Spill [...]
July 30, 2010 at 1:56 pm
Horrifying, isn’t it? I think there’s just no commitment to quality at Yahoo!.
July 31, 2010 at 4:18 pm
I don’t know about you, but ‘clean-up’ is a horrible, clumsey phrase at the best of times. Much better to recase.
July 31, 2010 at 4:19 pm
Whoops recast.
Hit return, not backspace
July 31, 2010 at 4:43 pm
Choosing to use “cleanup” or “clean-up” might have been the result of a space issue. It’s a fairly common word in the U.S., so I think it’s understandable by the target audience. But it wouldn’t have been hard to standardize its spelling.