It’s not good news

I’m sorry to be the one to say this, but I must. The blog Yahoo! Profiles News is just not good. It may contain useful information, but with the number of errors it displays, who can trust it?

Here are just a few examples: The use of a hyphen instead of a dash is a relatively minor but annoying problem. But the inability to distinguish between a singular noun (like parenthesis) and its plural (parentheses) does not reflect well on the writer and his or her employer:

A simple hyphen would make right hand right, and changing your contact card to a contact card would make the sentence actually understandable:

It’s such a common mistake on Yahoo! that I’m surprised someone hasn’t told the writers there that it’s is not a possessive pronoun:

The subject of this sentence is singular, and its verbs should be, too:

And finally, I’m altogether confused by the use and placement of all together here:

An altogether wrong word

The writer of this snippet from Yahoo! Shine is altogether, completely, utterly, and entirely wrong in the use of all together:

Too many to count

I don’t mean to be passive-aggressive about errors found on the Web. I’m just aggressive when I find so many errors in an article that I can’t count them. Take these excerpts from a Yahoo! Shine blog post:

There’s altogether too many misspellings, incorrect capitalizations, and hyphens gone missing or gone wild here:

and here:

I never thought that I would see the day when a state as large as Texas would look so small:

And this blog post ends with Tip #11 and a mystery word:

All of this wouldn’t be half as sad if it weren’t for the headline to this article:

Apparently I’m not the only one who can’t count.

All together is altogether different

All together now, repeat after me: Altogether means “entirely, completely, utterly.”  This excerpt from Yahoo! Shine gets it altogether wrong.

Later in the same article, I found a real surprise:

I was caught entirely, completely, and utterly off-guard by the missing hyphen.