No Pulitzer Prize for this writer

If there were a prize for really embarrassing writing mistakes, this writer from Yahoo! Style would be in contention. There are few errors more embarrassing than misspelling the topic of your article. Like Lilly Pulitzer:

It’s possible to overlook the missing apostrophe in what should be the possessive brand’s. But no one with a basic knowledge of grammar can overlook this mismatch of subject and verb:

This writer’s style lacks a certain cachet — literally. She chose cache (which is pronounced cash and refers to concealed valuables or a type of computer storage) instead of the correct cachet.

Finally, convinced she knows how to spell Pulitzer and proving herself wrong again, she provides more evidence that she’s not going to be winning any prizes anytime soon:

It takes up way too much gray matter

Matching a pronoun to the word it refers to uses too much gray matter for the writer for Yahoo! DIY:

The pronoun it can only refer to a singular noun, like, oh, say, maybe hammock. The careful writer (which is not the person who wrote this article), would have used they (and changed the verbs takes and makes to agree with it), or would have changed Hammocks to A hammock.

Joy and cheer of reading recede

Readership can suffer as the joy and cheer of reading recede with every mistake on the Yahoo! front page:

What is so hard about matching a verb (which should be recede) with a plural subject (like joy and cheer)?

The number is close to one

The number of errors that you’ll find in this sentence from Yahoo! Celebrity is close to one:

It’s so close to one, that it is one. And it’s a common subject-verb disagreement when the subject is number. Here’s what the American Heritage Dictionary says about number as a collective noun:

As a collective noun number may take either a singular or a plural verb. It takes a singular verb when it is preceded by the definite article the: The number of skilled workers is increasing. It takes a plural verb when preceded by the indefinite article a: A number of the workers have learned new skills.

Everyone needs an editor

The editor in chief over at Yahoo! Style could use a little help in the editing department:

If you think readers don’t care about grammar, here’s what one person said about the article:

Joe, you commented . . .”but upon careful inspection we did realize that she pulled off a styling trick that us fashion editors – and Carrie Bradshaw – have been doing for years.” As Editor in Chief, I hope you recognize your grammar faux pas. “Us fashion editors” needs to be & quot;we” with no two ways about it! As I tell my students, “Check your work!” You would be wise to do the same!

Wondering about wanderlust

Those wacky editors over at Yahoo! Style are at it again with their crazy-ass vocabulary and their grammatical blunders:

In their world, wanderlust isn’t an obsession or impulse to travel. It’s a synonym for wanderers or travelers (which, of course, it isn’t to the rest of us). Maybe. That’s the only explanation I can offer to the use of the pronoun their. It needs an antecedent (the thing it refers to) and it looks like the reader has to supply it, since the writer didn’t.

Writer of anarchy

If you’ve never seen than mistaken for then, or haven’t seen the compound adjective 30-second without its hyphen, then you haven’t been reading Yahoo! DIY.

What would Yahoo! DIY be without its very own misuse of it’s for its?

Somehow in that same article, this got past the eagle-eyed editors:

I think it has something to do with wearing a pattern to keep your head warm. Frankly, I think a hat would be warmer than a pattern.

Of course there are more typos, like this one below:

Call me old-fashioned, but I appreciate the well-placed hyphen and the beauty of a real dash (like this: —) and not a puny hyphen:

Also, I think pronouns (like them) should refer to a noun that’s actually present in the same sentence. Or paragraph. Or article.

This doesn’t sound good

Everything in this sentence on Yahoo! Sports sounds good until you get to the verb. And then a little subject-verb clash happens:

The subject is plural; the verb should be, too. And that would be sound.

What a crock!

This article on Yahoo! DIY has a promising start: The writer, whose title is actually editor, gave the trademarked Crock-Pot its due with capital letters and a hyphen. Then the wheels fell off:

She has a little trouble with the extraneous them, which was just dropped in for no reason. And more trouble with the pronoun they, which requires a plural antecedent (the object it refers to); there’s just none other than recipes and that makes no sense. Of course, we know she should have used the singular it, referring to Crock-Pot, which is how she should have spelled the trademarked name of the slow cooker.

Never know whom to thank?

If you spotted this grammatical error on the Yahoo! front page, thank a teacher: