Looks like the writer for the blog of the Yahoo! Newsroom coasted through today’s assignment. When it refers to the U.S. region bordering the Atlantic Ocean, East Coast deserves two capital letters:
In this sentence, either which should be that or a town should be deleted:
There’s another choice the writer should have made: pleaded or pled, two acceptable past tenses of the verb plead. At least the writer spelled the past tense of receive correctly, though the verb should be receive.
I nearly emitted a guffaw when I read this on Yahoo! Movies:
I don’t think the writer understands the meaning of remit or when to use that instead of which.
Does it take a nitpicky editor to note the use of which instead of that on the Yahoo! front page?
Grammar nerds will note that the nonrestrictive clause, which isn’t necessary to uniquely identify the object it modifies, requires which. The clause that is necessary to identify the object it modifies is restrictive and requires that.
In a Yahoo! Shine post about Gmail’s new “Undo” button, the writer could use a similar feature for blogs:
A spelling and grammar checker would be helpful, too. It might replace that with the correct which, put quotation marks around send, spell realize correctly, and change the typo you to your. Maybe it could even figure out why the writer is saying something about chopping off a donut:
Hmm. Those errors are really awkward, aren’t they? An “Undo” button might be useful, but a better option? Don’t publish anything before you’ve proofread it.
Every Web site should have an “editorial plan” that includes writing guidelines. Yahoo! Shine writers and editors could sure use one. Maybe it could explain the difference between restrictive and nonrestrictive clauses. A restrictive clause, which is necessary to identify the noun it modifies, uses that. And that’s the problem in this sentence in an article about Angelina Jolie:
The guidelines might also suggest ways to proofread what you’ve written. Heck, if it just required proofreading, that would be a start! Then the writers might avoid typos like this:
Just which counties does Angelina Jolie enlist for help? If it’s Namibia, perhaps the writer meant countries. That’s a reasonable explanation, though I have no explanation for this mess:
Whew. The only thing I can figure out is that the subject and verb don’t agree. I’m betting that federal filings didn’t give the grants. Maybe the grants were from Ms. Jolie and Mr. Pitt’s charity?
While I’m on the subject of charity, I’ll take the charitable view that the writer didn’t have a standard to follow for writing a movie title:
What to do? Enclose it in quotation marks? Display it in italic? Oh, what the heck. Let’s just leave it as is and let the reader figure it out.
World AIDS Day deserves better treatment than it gets from this error-laden special page from Yahoo! Events:
I don’t know the origin of the misspelling of syndrome or origin, but I suspect it’s just carelessness, as is the missing hyphen in gay-related. But what to make of the use of a singular verb (has) when the subject is plural?
Such a mistreatment is difficult to understand; perhaps the writer was in a hurry. That might explain the use of a comma where a period, colon, or semicolon is required:
There’s no shortage of periods in the initialism HIV, which doesn’t need them. And that which should be that: The clause is a restrictive one, meaning it’s necessary to identify the noun it modifies (marrow).
The Yahoo! front page, which is the most visited page on the Web, confuses a restrictive and a nonrestrictive clause. But it’s probably just me and a few other grammar nerds who care about such things and the use of which when that is called for.
A restrictive clause is a clause that can’t be omitted from a sentence without affecting the basic meaning of the sentence. It takes that.
A nonrestrictive clause, which can be omitted without affecting the meaning of the sentence, needs which.
