Even so-called professional writers make grammatical, punctuation, and spelling mistakes — especially if they work for Yahoo!. Take this example from Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer believes that quotation marks belong after the expression “so-called”:
They don’t. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, “Quotation marks are not used to set off descriptions that follow expressions such as so-called and self-styled, which themselves relieve the writer of responsibility for the attribution: his so-called foolproof method (not ‘foolproof method’).“
That’s a common mistake. On Yahoo!, there are a lot of common mistakes, like failing to match a pronoun with its antecedent (the word it refers to). And failing to hyphenate modern-day when it’s used as an adjective, misspelling Flintstones, and best of all using peddles instead of pedals:
This is more akin to a careless error:
And any decent spell-checker would have flagged Minnealpolis as a misspelling:
But for Yahoo!’s so-called journalists, spell-checking is optional. Heck, it’s not just optional, it’s nonexistent.
Just to be sure we understand that Jeff Stone is a Republican state representative, the writer tells us in two slightly different ways, each containing its own errors:
If you think I’m the only person who is appalled by this professional writer’s ignorance, you’d be wrong. Here’s one comment left by a reader:
“using peddles underneath their seats”
“PEDDLES”???? Jeezuz Joe Bob. My 6-year-old can write better than this. Apparently they’re trying to solve the unemployment problem by giving illiterate idiots jobs writing “news” articles. Sheesh.
