At least its peak is right

At least the writer of Yahoo! TV’s ”Primetime in No Time” spelled peak correctly, although it’s is the wrong homophone here:

Every time see I words out of order

Every time I see words out of order it’s like Strunk and White shooting me through the heart. And don’t get me started on the people who can’t tell the difference between its and it’s! Not once, but twice! Arrrrrrgh. All this in one paragraph on Yahoo! TV’s ”Daytime in No Time”:

Time for a quick dispatch of a writer

In a “Fashion Week dispatch” on Yahoo! Shine, the writer makes so many flagrant errors that perhaps she should be dispatched to a class for English-language learners.

Perhaps with the help of a professional, the writer would learn the difference between a contraction like it’s and a possessive pronoun like its. She might also learn that every pronoun has an antecedent — the word the pronoun refers to:

The pronoun must agree in number with its antecedent. So, maybe she wouldn’t use the pronouns their and them to refer a single dress.

A brief lesson in compound adjectives might help her understand that body-conscious and made-up each require a hyphen. A tutorial on proofreading might help avoid the insult of misspelling Herve Leger’s name.

The challenges of punctuation and spelling may be difficult to overcome, especially for a writer who doesn’t use any punctuation to set off a title, can’t seem to get the whole their/there thing right, stumbles on murmured (unless she really meant murdered), adds extraneous punctuation and perhaps drops a word or two: 

Typos like this are generally easy for the conscientious writer to spot:

And this should be a no-brainer:

And a lesson on how to use a dictionary would help her avoid a split-up of shakeup:

Do you think that education offers hope for this writer?

Isaac Mizrahi: Missing from Fashion’s Night Out?

Isaac Mizrahi is missing from this article about Fashion’s Night Out that appears on Yahoo! Shine:

Also missing is the word is following industry as well as the apostrophe in the contraction can’t:

Perhaps the apostrophe was just misplaced. Ah, here it is, in all its incorrect glory:

Jeez, you’re breaking my heart!

I don’t know what this blogger on Yahoo! Shine is saying sometimes. But I must confess, I don’t spend a lot of time trying to decipher the mysterious content. But I’m pretty sure that it’s is wrong here:

But I don’t know if the writer meant “I also now recognize” or “I also know” or “I also recognize.” But frankly, dear reader, I don’t give a damn.

If my heart were in it, I’d read the blog more closely. And I wouldn’t be distracted by the grammatical errors, like a lack of agreement between the subject and verb of a sentence:

The subject is plural (ritual and scent), and the verb should be plural, too. (That would be ease, not eases.)

Another confounding sentence:

Did the writer mean “after you’ve passed” or “after you’re past”?

Maybe someone at Yahoo! should keep a list of these errors. Keeping a list of how they happen might help avoid goofs like this:

Just a thought.

It’s time to put ‘em in

Here are three apostrophes: ‘… ‘ …’…

Please put them in the words circled below in this teaser from Yahoo! omg!:

It’s Hilary Duff, Hilary Swank, but Hillary Clinton

Even if the writer of “Daytime in No Time” on Yahoo! TV had used the correct its (instead of it’s), this would still be a mess:

You’d think after Hillary Clinton has served as our first lady for eight year and a senator for as many years, and is now secretary of state, we’d all know how to spell her name. But nooooo:

Unlike Ms. Duff and Ms. Swank, the secretary of state spells her name with two L’s. Misplacing that L is probably a worse crime that misplacing a punctuation mark. Here, the period belongs after the closing parenthesis (those are my words).

If you mean once it’s released

Will you go see the Julia Roberts movie once it’s released? Maybe that’s the question that  Yahoo! omg! should have asked:

Someone needs a vacation

Every once in a while, even the best writers make a careless mistake.  But if the number and severity of the errors are like those in this Yahoo! Shine blog, it may be time for the writer to take a little vacation or at least step away from the keyboard for a day or two:

Usually the wee hours of a day occur in the morning, although I suppose 6 PM might be considered a wee hour of the night. The correct expression is “every once in a while.”  There’s an extra word in that sentence and an extraneous hyphen in weeklong.

Maybe the writer meant to put the indefinite article a in this sentence:

Hiking may be a trial for some people, even on a local trail:

I don’t know anything about the writer’s personal life, but it’s possible she’s suffering from new-parent stress:

That might explain this misplaced period (it belongs before the closing quotation mark) and the use of the possessive pronoun its instead of the correct contraction it’s:

She just may need to stop at a local eatery for a treat. A little sugar rush might be just what she requires.

This looks like a grammatically correct, error-free statement:

The problem? The author lists only four ideas, not five.

Whew. I think I’m the one who needs a vacation. Or maybe just a nap.

Maybe you shouldn’t rely on an editor

I was wrong. I’ve always advocated that anything written by a professional writer should also be edited by a professional editor. It’s one way to avoid embarrassing typos like this from Yahoo! Shine:

But then I read this editor’s note at the end of the blog post:

If you can’t trust an editor to know the difference between the contraction it’s and the possessive pronoun its, who can you trust? Certainly not the editors of Shine.