So few words, so many errors

It’s just two little words on the Yahoo! front page: ping pong. Add a hyphen and ping-pong would still be wrong. Capitalize the two Ps and Ping-Pong would still be wrong:

Why? Because Ping-Pong is a registered trademark; table tennis is the sport. It’s not the first time the Yahoo! editors have gotten it wrong.

This is so different from good

This isn’t the worst you’ll read on the Web. It’s not even the worst you’ll read on Yahoo!. But these excerpts from Yahoo! TV’s ”Daytime in No Time” aren’t good.

The errors start with Velcro, which is a trademark that requires a capital letter:

Ditto for Kitty Litter:

There’s the missing hyphen in high-powered (it’s a compound adjective) and the incorrectly capitalized real estate (it’s not a proper noun).

The errors are no different from the run-of-the-mill goofs you’ll find every day on Yahoo!:

And that’s not good.

Yahoo loses an iconic character

I don’t really care how a company spells its name or how its employees spell its name. So, if Yahoo! lets its writers spell its name without the iconic exclamation point, that’s fine and dandy with me. If it lets them spell it G-O-O-G-L-E, I don’t care. But spell ad with two capital letters, as if it were an acronym? That really chaps my hide.

Source: Yahoo! Avatars

Writing gone wild!

If you love doing puzzles, especially word puzzles, then this teaser from Yahoo! Shine is for you:

You probably recognize the arbitrary (and wrong) capitalization of fall (it’s not a proper noun). But what’s with that sentence? Is there a word missing? A word that’s wrong? Let me know if you figure out what’s gone wild with this puzzle.

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 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.