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.

Which is worse?

Which is worse? Dropping a word:

or adding a redundant one?

Just ask the readers of the Yahoo! front page, the most visited page on the Internet.

And then I wrote and and

OMG! Could this be any more obvious?

Where was the proofreader before this was published? Oh, yeah, Yahoo! omg! doesn’t have proofreaders.

This is the news

Keep in mind as you read this that it is from “The Ticket,” a blog brought to you by Yahoo! News:

You might not recognize the misspelling of Jay Pharoah’s name, but a real editor would.

Anyone with an IQ higher than room temperature would recognize this as sloppy journalism at its worst:

This is what passes for news at Yahoo!.

Writing with precision accuracy, precisely accurate

Johnny Manziel can throw a football with precision. Which is like saying he can throw a football accurately. So, why the heck did the editor for Yahoo! front page feel we had to know he throws with precision accuracy?

I guess that’s to distinguish his accuracy from imprecision accuracy.

That would be where you’d find cities

Most — if not all — cities are located in urban areas. But in case you forgot that, the editors for the Yahoo! front page have provided a handy little reminder:

The American Heritage Dictionary tells us that urban means “of, relating to, or located in a city.”

Do you get this?

Can you explain how a misspelling of ricochet gets past a spell-checker? Or how “impact upon himself” is better than “hit him”?

It’s a small part of the fun on Yahoo! News‘ “The Sideshow,” where the writer helpfully points out that 4:30am occurred in the morning:

I don’t get what this is supposed to be, do you?

I don’t get why the writer thinks “fallen trees have long been a risk.” Fallen trees aren’t nearly as much of a risk as falling trees:

I don’t get it: How does a self-respecting writer produce mistakes like these? How does an Internet giant like Yahoo! publish them?

It’s not the most most mistakes

It’s not the most mistakes you’ll find in a single article on Yahoo!. (I believe that distinction belongs to a writer for Yahoo! Shine, who managed more than 50 mistakes in a single article.) This article from Yahoo! Sports’ “Prep Rally” just contains some completely avoidable errors, like the misspelled Buckley School and the duplicated word:

The words their, there, and they’re are on every list of mistakes that make you look stupid. So, of course, you’ll find a homophonic mistake in this article, too:

This isn’t so bad; it’s just missing the hyphen in Washington-Lee:

But misspelling Rachael Ray? That woman is everywhere! How can you not know how to spell her name?

That’s the meaning of the word

Before you’re allowed to write for yahoo.com, which is viewed by millions of people around the world, you should have to pass a basic knowledge and vocabulary test. At a minimum, you should have the knowledge of U.S. government that a sixth grader has. You should know that United States senators are elected by people in their state, who are called constituents.

Death of the language

You know that the English language has met its fatal, lethal, deadly demise when you can read this on yahoo.com, the most visited Web page in the world: