Slippery slop

There’s an amazing article on Yahoo! Shine. Amazing in the variety and number of sloppy errors one writer can make and inflict on the public. From the overly punctuated quotations here:

and here:

to the unnecessary and duplicated words here:

There’s a mysterious expression that defies explanation:

And the use of a zero instead of the letter O:

WTF? How does the writer not see this little bit of HTML when proofreading?

Silly me. Clearly the writer doesn’t proofread, because if she did, she’d notice that this is the wrong word:

Injecting a little humor, the writer continues with the slop:

Not that this is the worst error ever, but a missing article here makes the whole sentence a tad awkward:

Poor Dad. He’s deserving of a capital letter here:

Humor again! I love it! The writer was hoarding the hilarious homophonous errors, but is sharing them with the reader:

This slippery slop may just get the writer a jump-start on reconsidering her career choice:

That’s one weird Halloween

This headline on Yahoo! Shine is just plain weird:

When did Halloween become a common noun?

Writing in No Time

Maybe this article on Yahoo! TV should be called “Writing in No Time” instead of  ”Daytime in No Time.” It contains enough errors to indicate that perhaps the writer was a tad rushed. That might explain the misspelling of Vuzix sunglasses:

Or the misuse of the noun makeover instead of the two-word make over:

With a deadline speeding toward you, you might not realize that Mom should be capitalized here:

But Kidney shouldn’t be:

Frankly, I can’t blame speed for the laughably misspelled bunyon or the mysterious words here:

In a rush? Maybe. Sloppy writing? Definitely.

It’s a really scary Halloween

Scary writing on Yahoo! Shine today:

Is this a new stylin’ of Halloween? A new capitalization style for headlines? An embarrassing mistake by the writer? You decide.

Most inauspicious start serves as warning

This has got to be the most inauspicious start you can imagine. The name in this headline on Yahoo! Shine is misspelled:

Oh, boy. After misspelling Agyness Deyn, is the writer able to redeem herself with spiffy, error-free copy in the article itself? Silly rabbit. Of course not. It’s just serves as a warning to the poor reader who dares venture further. I took up the challenge so you don’t have to. But I’m not happy about it.

I don’t know what’s up with the verb tense here:

And the writer continues to have a problem spelling Jean Paul Gaultier, although this is the worst of the manglings she’s produced.

Here’s a repeated word (wouldn’t a quick proofreading have found it?) and an overcapitalized Rio de Janeiro:

Halle Berry was a runner-up, though it’s missing a hyphen:

Brooke Shields gets the redundancy treatment and a superfluous comma:

Someone should remove the Comma key from this gal’s keyboard, cuz clearly she doesn’t know when to use it:

Oh, god, she can’t spell reprise and she’s totally lost when it comes to hyphenating compound adjectives:

I have no idea. No idea at all:

I’m still clueless:

I’m guessing she means transitioned:

And there’s another missing hyphen followed by yet another incredibly ignorant use of a comma:

Please tell me she was kidding with this misspelling of Steven Seagal’s name:

Oh, god. I’m speechless. She’s writing about models and can’t spell Amber Valletta:

Finally, one more meaningless punctuation mark:

Let’s see. There’s four misspelled celebrities (I believe it’s a Terribly Write record for a single article), punctuation thrown about like rice at a wedding, and at least three unintelligible phrases (or maybe they’re actually clauses). So it started off bad and went downhill from there. Fast.

What’s the worst error on the planet?

The worst writing errors on Earth aren’t in this article on Yahoo! Shine. But the article,  about anthropologist Peter McAllister, makes some pretty basic errors that destroy its credibility. It starts by misspelling the subject’s name:

A missing hyphen here isn’t the worst offence:

But the misspelled name (again!) and a missing word here might be:

All these errors aren’t the worst writing problems on Earth:

It’s just the overall impression that’s going to destroy the writer’s and the article’s credibility.

It’s your damned company!

It’s really none of my business, but I can’t let this go without comment. Normally, a company protects its brand like a mama bear protects its cubs, without all the fur-flying stuff. So if a company like Yahoo! wants to spell its brand without the !, who am I to complain? Heck, if they want to spell it G-O-O-G-L-E, that’s okey-dokey, too.

So, the missing ! in two instances in one paragraph may not be an issue for the Internet giant. Clearly, Yahoo! has a casual attitude about niceties like capitalization (why is yodel capped?) and grammar (there’s a missing apostrophe and S):

But when the writer can’t spell the name of world-renowned yodeler Wylie Gustafson correctly, I’ve got to call them out. It’s your damned company! Spell it anyway you want. But don’t mess with Wylie!

I wish it were the grammar gods

I wish it were the grammar gods that spoke to the writer of this article on Yahoo! Shine and turned her away from random capitalizations:

Or the typo-spotting gods to help with removing unintentionally humorous errors:

Or the put-a-hyphen-in-there gods to create a compound adjective:

Or the you-can’t-be-serious gods:

Or the capitalization-isn’t-a-random-act gods:

Us have it all except correct grammar

Jeez. How do you write “us New Yorkers have it all” and still keep your job? Or at least publish what you write without benefit of an editor?

It helps if you write for Yahoo! in general and Yahoo! Shine in particular. “Minor” problems like using usas the subject of a verb and decapping the in an article about the store called The Limited are everyday occurrences. I guess you just get inured to grammatical goofs.

Did I mention she is a two-time Oscar winner?

Just so there’s no confusion, the writer for The Thread on Yahoo! Shine repeats an apparently important detail about Hilary Swank: She’s won two Oscars. Now that you’re clear on that, let’s overlook the misplaced comma and the sentence starting with a lowercase when,  and focus on the misspelling of Amelia Earhart:

Er. It’s a little hard to understand the spelling of Erhart. But clearly we’re not reading an article written by a grammatical genius. It doesn’t take a genius to know that the arbitrary capitalization of the common noun divas is just wrong:

When a mistake like this is right in front of your eyes, you can’t ignore it:

And did I mention there’s strange comma after the word eyes? And that Hilary Swank is a two-time Oscar winner?