Perhaps it’s a love of punctuation that drove the editor for Yahoo! Shine to write TV with periods (it’s not an abbreviation of tele vision) and tearjerkers with a hyphen:
According to several dictionaries (including the American Heritage Dictionary, which the editor could have found on the Yahoo! network), there’s no hyphen in tearjerker.
If you’re writing about the movies and you know nothing about writing — or movies — you might work for Yahoo! Movies:
A real cinema maven knows who Preston Sturges is and knows how to spell his name. A real writer would never form the plural of brother with an apostrophe. And a real writer who writes for a U.S. audience knows that the period goes before the closing quotation mark.
They’ve given up. The editors and writers for yahoo.com have finally thrown in the towel and have abandoned all pretense of trying to write accurately and correctly. They’re just banging on keyboards now, hitting random keys and pushing the results out to the public.
They’re not even trying to get LL Cool J’s name right. (Hint: It does not contain periods.) They’re not even trying to get hip-hop right. (Hint: It does contain a hyphen.) They’re not even proofreading. (Hint: Assault has two A’s.) They’ve given up. How long before the public gives up on them?
This probably makes sense to the editor for the Yahoo! front page, but to people living in the United States, it means Mississippi District of Columbia:
Yup, the abbreviation Miss. is short for that Southern state. The title miss (as in Miss D.C.) is not an abbreviation.
Who woulda thunk it!? There it is, right on Yahoo! Shine: Anything that is negotiable is — wait for it — negotiable! Yes, everything negotiable is negotiable, except for school administrators:
It’s fairly obvious that the writer doesn’t know the difference between a principle (which is a basic truth, law, or assumption) and a principal (which is someone or something with the highest rank, like a school administrator). You know what else is obvious? That the writer didn’t do a spell check, because even the crappiest spell checker would find this repeated word:
(Some writers don’t know that if the words within parentheses are a complete sentence, then the ending punctuation belongs inside the parentheses, too.) Oops, here’s a misplaced period:
And here’s another homophonic horror: The possessive pronoun its instead of the contraction it’s:
It’s getting more obvious that the writer doesn’t know when to use an apostrophe, because she missed one here, too:
Pronouns are pesky little things, aren’t they? They generally have to refer to a noun, and when they don’t, they just don’t make a lot of sense:
Is it asking asking too much that a professional writer proofread her work or at least use a spell checker?
Some things just seem to go hand in hand, like writing mistakes and Yahoo! Shine:
The writing on that site just never seems to have a pulled-together look. It is hardly the premier site for women. Its roster of errors includes a mismatch of subject and verb, incorrect idioms, wrong words, arbitrary punctuation… need I say more?
Just one more thing: There’s the occasional repetition:
Just one more thing: There’s the occasional repetition.
Some people just shouldn’t try to be clever when they’re writing. You don’t need to read beyond the first paragraph of this article from Yahoo! Shine to see that the writer is one of those people. It will twist your ventricles into a vice:
I’m going to attempt a simultaneous translation of that little expression: By “ventricles” the writer means “heart.” By “vice” the writer means “smoking, gambling, or other unsavory activity.” So, the dude in question will twist your heart until you start smoking or playing the ponies. Makes sense. (The misspelling in what should be “50 Shades of Grey” is hardly worth mentioning after that.)
Those of you still reading, undeterred by that gem, will uncover a missing word here:
and (surprise!) a missing word there:
If you’re foolish enough to continue reading, you may want to chew on this for a while:
Trudging on, you’ll find a missing comma, another missing word, a missing space, and one too many periods. (Only the one before the closing parenthesis is correct):
Finally, if you’re dotty enough to read the photo caption, you’ll see that the writer can’t tell a plural from a singular noun:
I think I’ll go take an aspirin after that. My ventricles feel like they’ve been clamped in a vise and I feel a little cardiac event coming on.
If you’re a regular reader of Yahoo! Shine, you know what to expect — mistakes, and lots of them. You know that writers often drop words, especially little ones:
You know that the writers often misspell names, like Allison Benedikt. (If you can’t look at the name and reproduce on a keyboard, try copy and paste. It really is that easy.) You also expect punctuation errors. (If there is a complete sentence within parentheses and it’s not embedded in another sentence, put the period in there, too.)
In this article about the book “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” the writer shortens the title to “What to Expect.” But, it should get some capital letters and quotation marks; otherwise, it just looks like a confusing mess. Another expected missing word (the expression is “weighing in on”) and a misspelling (it’s copycats):
And depending on whom you ask, who is the wrong word. (If you ask a Shine writer, they probably think it’s OK.)
One misspelled name is never enough for Shine staffers. Vicki Iodine sounds like a healer. Or a typo. Her name is Vicki Iovine.
What to expect when you’re reading Shine: Errors. And lots of them.
What do you call a writer whose works appear on one of the most popular sites on the Internet, and yet doesn’t bother to spell-check her pearls? Arrogant? Lazy? Or maybe simply an egomaniac who doesn’t believe she could make a mistake? Me? I’d call her a writer for Yahoo! Shine:
Someone who doesn’t bother to proofread her gems wouldn’t notice a missing parenthesis, a missing word, a misspelled FAO Schwarz, and the quaint amidst:
This description of a hairstyle is so confusing, I bet even the writer has no idea what she meant:
It should come as no surprise that the woman knows little about punctuation or grammar. The period belongs before the closing parenthesis (because that’s a complete sentence inside the parens). She could remove the ring more easily (an adverb is required to modify the verb remove). Is tweet a proper noun? No, it’s not. It’s now accepted as a verb:
Here’s a sighting of a homophonic error and a truly ridiculous grammatical error:
Maybe this writer is an egomaniac. Maybe she needs to ask for an editor. Maybe she just doesn’t care.
Good grief! What kind of education did the Yahoo! Shine writer get? Did it include anything about English grammar and punctuation? Anything? Maybe she was out the day her third-grade teacher told the class not to use both an exclamation mark and a period at the end of a sentence.
Did the teacher also say something about making sure your sentences weren’t sense-free? It was probably unnecessary — except for one little girl who missed the whole point.
But I quibble. So far, Yahoo! Shine is getting raves from unexpected critics. OK, I made that up. In fact, I have no idea what that would mean. I was just parroting what the writer told me:
