How did you get that title?

How does someone get the job title of senior editor for Yahoo! Shine? Do you need to know anything about popular culture? Nope. In fact, you can screw up the title of the popular TV series “Downton Abbey”:

You can even screw up facts like the year that “Dangerous Liaisons” was released (it was 1988) and the year Madonna performed at the MTV Awards (it was 1990):

You can misspell Daniela Denby-Ashe’s name:

and drop the hyphen from Catherine Zeta-Jones:

You can even insert an apostrophe in Kaiulani and move the hyphen in Jenna-Louise Coleman’s name:

Forgot the comma in “Murder, She Wrote”? No problem!

Even if you get three out of three titles wrong (“The House of Elliott,” “Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna,” and “Downton Abbey” would be correct), you can still call yourself a senior editor:

Making do with what you have

If you make three boneheaded errors at the beginning of a sentence, perhaps you should stop writing and correct your mistakes, rather than continue with the sentence.

But the writer for Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow” has another idea: He’s happy to make do with the limited skills he has. He doesn’t seem to mind that New Haven got shortchanged, that due isn’t what the police made, and that a semicolon isn’t a substitute for a comma.

Are you kidding!?

Was the writer for Yahoo! Movies having a good laugh when writing about a movie that’s “to risque”? Personally, I think that’s too funny, as are the misspelling of Flintstones and the use of a comma where a semicolon belongs:

If you’re a phonetic speller, you might think this is how to spell Judy Blume. Oh, there’s that semicolon! Of course, it doesn’t belong here:

OK, so now I know the writer has a sense of humor. Maybe she meant court marshal? Or court jester, because this is kinda funny:

Ha-ha! No, it’s not the same “Jurassic Park” we knew and loved, it’s some crazed misspelling:

This is so sad

Reading this one sentence on the home page of Yahoo! Answers just made me sad:

The writer clearly has no idea how to write a simple sentence. It makes me sad that she thinks words can be capitalized without regard to their meaning. It makes me sad that she has no idea how to use punctuation of any sort. It makes me sad that Yahoo! thinks that this is acceptable on one of its most popular services.

A well-deserved bad rap

This writer for Yahoo! Shine may get a bad rap for her writing skills, and it’s well-deserved. She’s unfamiliar with basic rules of punctuation: There’s no need for a hyphen between an adverb ending in -LY and that word it modifies. She doesn’t know a real buzzword from her made-up “buzz” words. And her ability to match a pronoun to its antecedent is sketchy at best (even implying that “buzz” words have hefty price tags):

Her random commas strewn about like thumbtacks on a highway stop readers in their tracks:

Her “bad wrap” just contributes to her bad rap:

as does her arbitrary hyphenation of antioxidants and her failure to realize that supermarkets have aisles and not isles, which are land masses surrounded by water:

Can you blame me if I don’t trust anything this writer says about anything?

Were you comma-tose when you wrote that?

Someone writing for the Yahoo! front page has gone a little comma-happy:

With all those commas, this is the equivalent of what the writer wrote: This is not a side table. It is not a place to store magazines. It is not a set a remote control.

What the writer meant: It’s not a side table or a place to store magazines or set a remote control.

Only three?

This is practically perfect. It’s the first sentence in an article on Yahoo! Shine and it only has three mistakes! There’s only one misspelled name (it should be Farrah Fawcett), there’s only one punctuation mistake (that comma should be an em dash), and only one incorrect word:

I don’t know anyone who covets beauty icons, do you? They might envy icons or wish to emulate or copy icons — but have a desire to own a beauty icon? Not so much.

Reign of error

This 2-sentence excerpt comprises some common mistakes you’ll see on Yahoo! Movies:

There’s the misuse of comprised of, which should be comprises or consists of or something similar. Then there’s the use of twenty-six, which isn’t a mistake if that’s the house style. But, most style guides recommend using digits for numbers that are 10 or above. What’s not a matter of house style? The use of a semicolon, which should be a comma.

When it comes to language, style and punctuation, it appears that the writer had free rein.

Daryl Hannah, head of Sierra Club?

How did I miss that news? According to yahoo.com, actress and tree-hugger Daryl Hannah is the head of the Sierra Club!

If you harbor any doubts that punctuation can change the meaning of a sentence, let me assure you that it can. Just add a comma where it doesn’t belong and an actress can take over one of the most powerful environmentalist groups in the world.

Breaking news: Dress did not attack people

Listen, people! If you think that the dress that Jennifer Lawrence wore to the SAG Awards ripped, criticized, or attacked people, you are mistaken. I know this because I read it on Yahoo! Shine:

If you think that the writer of that headline is ignorant of the need for a comma to set off a direct address, you would be correct. The writer is actually addressing people and a comma before people would have told you that. Get that, people?