Guess what’s not a question

Are you as confounded by punctuation as the staffers over at Yahoo! Shine are? They seem to just sprinkle those little marks in everything they write, like so much fairy dust, as if they’ll turn the simplest headlines into Pulitzer-worthy gems.

It doesn’t work that way. Adding a colon doesn’t make this headline more striking. It just looks silly:

They must think that any sentence or headline that starts with how is a question. That’s not how it works:

That’s not a question. Guess what else is not a question — this simple imperative sentence:

How do you do that?

How does one date a restaurant? Is it like carbon-dating? Those are just two of the questions I’m pondering after reading this on Yahoo! Sports:

Ha-ha. I know what the writer meant, even if the result is something different. The clause “Hardy had been dating…” modifies waitress. The writer should have put them closer together, maybe like this:

… Holder, an EpiCentre restaurant waitress, whom Hardy had been dating…

Not just for car enthusiasts

I don’t usually hang around Yahoo! Autos. It’s not because I don’t like cars; it’s because I’m not really interested in reading about cars. And now that I’ve seen the home page of Autos, I think I may be mousing around there, looking for some gems for Terribly Write.

I didn’t have to look very far to see this mismatch of subject and verb. Nor to find the outdated reference to Czechoslovakia, which hasn’t existed in over 20 years:

This is one of those typos that defies explanation. Wouldn’t a spell-checker have alerted the writer that parnetship isn’t really a word?

I guess no one at Yahoo! knows how to use punctuation. You have to wonder why the writer didn’t think to include the apostrophe in harm’s way and why he or she thought a semicolon (and not a comma) was correct here:

Yahoo! Autos: It’s not just for car enthusiasts.

Would you write like this writer is?

I don’t know what to say about this. It’s just beyond my experience to explain why the writer or editor for Yahoo! Shine thought this could possibly be correct: