All-star small-screen goofs

If you’re unsure if two words should be joined with a hyphen, just do what the editors at Yahoo! Movies do: Use a hyphen. And omit a hyphen:

Good jobs!

What do you do, as a professional writer or editor, when faced with this challenge: A movie about Steve Jobs is advertised with the funky title of “jOBS.”  Do you use that same capitalization style when writing about it? Or do you use the traditional style and capitalize only the first letter? Or do you follow the lead of the editors for the Yahoo! front page and try two different styles?

Sometimes it’s better to just make a decision — any decision — and follow it consistently. Otherwise you may be looking for a new job.

This is some very funny stuff

It’s both sad and hilarious that the folks at Yahoo! Answers can’t decide how to spell its latest feature. Is it one word with camel case? Two words?

But it’s merely sad that the writer can’t match a verb (which should be is) to its subject. That is not some very funny stuff.

Was the Academy Awards show a big surprise?

Apparently the Oscars took the writers and editors at Yahoo! by surprise. They had no time to prepare. They had no time to make basic editorial decisions, like how to spell a simple word. It gets the one-word treatment on the Yahoo! front page:

But the folks at Yahoo! Movies have another idea — actually two other ideas:

Jeez. Yahoo! is covering the Oscars red carpet, and can’t even decide what to call the show? Maybe next year the Academy Awards won’t catch them off-guard, and the folks will have time to come up with a name they can all agree on.

If you can’t read, can you write?

Yes! Even if you are unable to read a simple “news” article on Yahoo!, you can get a job as a writer for the Yahoo! front page. Consider this example from yahoo.com: The writer claims that nominees who don’t win an Oscar can go to circus school:

Ha-ha! The article it refers to clearly states that it’s the children of nominees who get to go to clown college. And if you can’t read about the Vampire FaceLift (a registered trademark) you might not know how to spell the procedure. You might even spell it two ways and give one reference little quotation marks around it. Just in case it needed them.

Did you see the flyby?

Did you see the flyby on the Yahoo! front page?

The writer chose the preferred spelling of flyby, but that doesn’t stop another writer on yahoo.com from using the variant spelling:

Avoiding these inconsistencies is easy: Choose one dictionary as the authority on spelling and always use the preferred spelling of a word. It’s a lesson Yahoo! writers and editors have yet to learn.

What we need is a good antibiotic

Someone needs to discover an antibiotic to combat the epidemic of inconsistencies that appear daily on the Yahoo! front page. Today, the writers and/or editors can’t decide if antigay is a hyphenated word:

What is so hard about making a decision about the spelling of a word and sticking to it? It seems that Yahoo! staffers don’t realize they have a problem with consistency or they don’t care.

Can’t you make up your minds?

If you’re one of many writers and editors who produce content for one of the most visited sites on he Web, you’re faced with decisions every day. One of them might be how to spell a common word like recreate and a company name like GoDaddy:

Someone working on yahoo.com doesn’t agree with the spelling of recreate, insisting it needs a hyphen:

And there’s yet another disagreement: Someone thinks the company is Go Daddy:

What’s going on here? It’s simple: No one at Yahoo! knows which spelling is correct. And no one cares.

Shouldn’t you know by now?

The Screen Actors Guild Awards was five days ago. You’d think that the editors at yahoo.com would have figured out by now how to capitalize that title:

The SAG and legitimate news sources refer to it as the SAG Awards.

Why is it called a ‘fiscal cliff’?

Where did the term “fiscal cliff” come from? According to the folks who write for the Yahoo! front page, it’s a term that doesn’t imply an actual cliff, so its unusual usage deserves quotation marks:

I guess that means when it shows up on yahoo.com without quotation marks, it’s to be taken literally:

So, does it need quotation marks or not? I don’t know. But it does need some consistent treatment from “journalists” who work for the same company. Can’t they try to be consistent and pick one and go with it? Apparently not.

And why is it called the “fiscal cliff”? It’s because of this guy: