This writer for Yahoo! Shine may get a bad rap for her writing skills, and it’s well-deserved. She’s unfamiliar with basic rules of punctuation: There’s no need for a hyphen between an adverb ending in -LY and that word it modifies. She doesn’t know a real buzzword from her made-up “buzz” words. And her ability to match a pronoun to its antecedent is sketchy at best (even implying that “buzz” words have hefty price tags):
Her random commas strewn about like thumbtacks on a highway stop readers in their tracks:
Her “bad wrap” just contributes to her bad rap:
as does her arbitrary hyphenation of antioxidants and her failure to realize that supermarkets have aisles and not isles, which are land masses surrounded by water:
Can you blame me if I don’t trust anything this writer says about anything?
February 28, 2013 at 7:08 pm
Not to be too critical, but the “Absolutely not” paragraph really should have the quoted speech in quotes.
I’ll give the writer a pass for “locally-grown”, because that’s the way I see it in stores.
February 28, 2013 at 9:05 pm
It’s not clear that that’s a direct quote; it could be paraphrasing what she said. I give a pass to signs in stores, but not to the mistakes made by professional writers with access to the Internet, spell-checkers, proofreaders, and editors — and a potential readership of millions. That’s why I restrict my examples to the gaffes made by Yahoo! staffers. Plus, their errors are both numerous and humorous.
February 28, 2013 at 9:10 pm
That’s a leap of faith – calling the Yahoo! typists as “professional writers”.
(I was reminded of the old Truman Capote put-down of someone’s writing. He said, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”)
March 1, 2013 at 8:28 am
Ha! I like that! I’d have to agree that they’re not writers and certainly not journalists. Maybe I’ll start referring to them as typists.