Which is worse?

Which is worse? Dropping a word:

or adding a redundant one?

Just ask the readers of the Yahoo! front page, the most visited page on the Internet.

And then I wrote and and

OMG! Could this be any more obvious?

Where was the proofreader before this was published? Oh, yeah, Yahoo! omg! doesn’t have proofreaders.

Try the Reese Witherspoon Sobriety Club

If you’ve never woken up after a night of partying and repeated yourself, writing the same paragraph (or nearly the same paragraph) twice, congratulations!

The writer for Yahoo! Shine will now go collect her membership card to the Reese Witherspoon Sobriety Club.

This is the news

Keep in mind as you read this that it is from “The Ticket,” a blog brought to you by Yahoo! News:

You might not recognize the misspelling of Jay Pharoah’s name, but a real editor would.

Anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature would recognize this as sloppy journalism at its worst:

This is what passes for news at Yahoo!.

Writing with precision accuracy, precisely accurate

Johnny Manziel can throw a football with precision. Which is like saying he can throw a football accurately. So, why the heck did the editor for Yahoo! front page feel we had to know he throws with precision accuracy?

I guess that’s to distinguish his accuracy from imprecision accuracy.

That would be where you’d find cities

Most — if not all — cities are located in urban areas. But in case you forgot that, the editors for the Yahoo! front page have provided a handy little reminder:

The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that urban means “of, relating to, or located in a city.”

Do you get this?

Can you explain how a misspelling of ricochet gets past a spell-checker? Or how “impact upon himself” is better than “hit him”?

It’s a small part of the fun on Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer helpfully points out that 4:30am occurred in the morning:

I don’t get what this is supposed to be, do you?

I don’t get why the writer thinks “fallen trees have long been a risk.” Fallen trees aren’t nearly as much of a risk as falling trees:

I don’t get it: How does a self-respecting writer produce mistakes like these? How does an Internet giant like Yahoo! publish them?

Thank you, Captain Obvious

In case you harbored any doubts as to the location of Chicago homicides, the kind editors at Yahoo! News offer the facts:

What could be wrong with this?

It’s not hard to see what’s wrong in the opening paragraphs of this article on Yahoo! Shine:

Of course, we all know that the word duchess isn’t capitalized unless it’s part of the full title, like “Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge.” And we can all spot the missing word before “Kate Middleton.” (And by “all” I mean everyone in the English-speaking world except the writers and editors for Yahoo!.)

What could possibly be wrong with this — besides the name of the doctor? He’s Stephen Greenberg and he’s a New York-based doctor, who probably knows you don’t need both a dollar sign and the slangy “bucks”:

So, here we have the writer who again demonstrates her inability to copy a simple name and her ability to screw up a simple fact:

That quote isn’t from Dr. Greenblatt’s receptionist — or even Dr. Greenberg’s receptionist — it’s from Dr. Greenberg’s patient.

At least she got the doctor’s name right, but the name of the hospital (it’s Lenox Hill Hospital) wrong:

Other than getting the facts wrong, capitalizing words indiscriminately, omitting a word or two, neglecting punctuation, and adding a redundant word or two, this article is perfect!

It’s not the most most mistakes

It’s not the most mistakes you’ll find in a single article on Yahoo!. (I believe that distinction belongs to a writer for Yahoo! Shine, who managed more than 50 mistakes in a single article.) This article from Yahoo! Sports’ “Prep Rally” just contains some completely avoidable errors, like the misspelled Buckley School and the duplicated word:

The words their, there, and they’re are on every list of mistakes that make you look stupid. So, of course, you’ll find a homophonic mistake in this article, too:

This isn’t so bad; it’s just missing the hyphen in Washington-Lee:

But misspelling Rachael Ray? That woman is everywhere! How can you not know how to spell her name?