After reading a Yahoo! Shine article about foods that can cause headaches, I think I need a Tylenol. Who’d have thought that a professional writer could confuse effect with affect?
The same writer who uses the noun (effect) instead of the verb (affect), omits a word here:
My advice: Pay particular attention when you read blogs on Yahoo!, which have been identified as triggers for headaches.
Yahoo! TV’s Primetime in No Time’s use of affect (a verb) instead of effect (a noun) produces the wrong effect here:
Confusing those two words can affect your readers’ perception of you as a writer, especially when you make the same mistake twice in a single article:
According to Associated Press style, the American Heritage Dictionary, and even Yahoo!’s style guide, it’s daylight-saving time:
I guess the Yahoo! Shine writer didn’t get the memo. Or at least didn’t look up the correct hyphenation and capitalization (not to mention the singular saving). That’s the kind of error that affects my mood.
The effect of using the wrong word in this Yahoo! Shine link isn’t a good one. It definitely affects my desire to click it. And not in a good way.
Errors can affect a Web site’s credibility, and one of the easiest errors to avoid is using effect when you mean affect. These two words are often confused, although most experienced writers can distinguish between the noun (effect) and the verb (affect). So let’s just assume the writer of this paragraph from Yahoo! Shine was a bit distracted by her enlarging derriere to notice the error:
And I’m sure the writer would be totally bummed to see the repetitive bum bum. (Unless that’s a neologism that I’m unaware of. If so, I apologize for my abysmal ignorance.)
Those of you with the fortitude to read the entire excerpt have already noticed the coy use of sh**ty. I just don’t get it: Why try to barely disguise a word you know you shouldn’t use in polite society? It’s as if the asterisks create a secret code, knowable by only a privileged few within the author’s inner circle. Frankly, what it really means is that the writer needs a few high-school vocab lessons.
