Written by a so-called professional?

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.

Something’s afoot and it’s not good

It’s not the worst typo a writer can make, but it’s an easy one to spot if you’re writing about Ray Halbritter:

Maybe the writer needs some assistance in the proofreading department:

And editor who knows that either is singular and it’s is the contraction for it has would certainly help:

But something is afoot at Yahoo! Sports‘ “Prep Rally”: There’s no proofreader or editor at hand.

Give up the reins

If you make mistakes like those made by the author of Yahoo! Sports‘ “Puck Daddy,” you should consider letting someone take the reins and edit your work:

If you don’t know that a monarch reigns and a horse is controlled by reins, you need a little editorial support.

If you’re writing an article about Glen Gulutzan, the editor might let you know if you misspell his name:

And if that editor knows that whom is the objective case of who (and is therefore correct as the object of a preposition), hand over the reins. Just be sure that the editor knows that when a subject is joined by or, the verb (which should be is) agrees with the noun closer to it:

One of these is wrong

Let’s hope that one of these words on Yahoo! News is a typo, because I’d hate to think a professional scribe thinks both words are correct:

Here comes more of the same

I wasn’t going to mention this mistake on the home page Yahoo! Movies — it’s likely just a typo, right?

And then I saw this on Yahoo! Movies and figured maybe the Einsteins who write these captions really are grammatically challenged:

All I needed was one more example of a subject and verb mismatch to convince I was right:

“Men in Black 4″ is the title of a movie. It is singular and takes a singular verb like, oh, say, maybe comes.

Many openly cling to its grammatical mistakes

Writers for Yahoo! Shine know that their management is totally indifferent to quality content. Many, therefore, openly cling to bad grammar in their articles:

They happily use a word like glamor instead of the preferred spelling, glamour. And they can’t seem to match a pronoun (which should be their, not its) to its antecedent.

You wrote wha?

There is just no explanation for this caption, except maybe that the writer, editor, proofreader and anyone involved with Yahoo! Shine were all non-English speakers high on glue when this was published:

You guys slay me!

And not in a good way. Trying to make a noun like slay into a verb is just hilarious.

Today’s laugh of the day comes to you courtesy of the Yahoo! front page team.

Ungrammatical and inaccurate?

What are the chances you’d find a grammatical and a factual error in an article on Yahoo! omg!? Very, very high. It comes as no surprise that a writer who thinks this is correct:

Would also think that Nadya Suleman is a mom of eight:

OK, so maybe she’s the mom of eight. And the mom of nine. And ten. And 14. Although she’s known as Octomom, she actually has 14 children. A fact that seemed to have escaped the notice of this writer.

They’re totally wrong

Did the editor for Yahoo! Shine actually use the pronoun they to refer to the singular antecedent implant? Yes, yes, she did: