How many mistakes can you crowd into a single sentence? If you write for yahoo.com, quite a few:
I can’t understand why the writer abbreviated secretary and capitalized the abbreviation and the word state. According to the Associated Press style (which Yahoo! claims to follow), the title secretary of state should never be abbreviated and is capitalized only when it precedes a name. Maybe the writer was trying to conserve space so that there was room to repeat of the crisis.
Yahoo! Shine writers check in with Terribly Write on occasion, and usually correct the mistakes reported here. But sometimes they introduce new errors to laughable effect.
Take the case of the post “Recipe for Disaster?” that noted the missing hyphen in lattice-topped, the incorrect attribution of a recipe to AllRecipes, and the misuse of old-fashion for old-fashioned.
To Shine’s credit, the hyphen now appears correctly, although perhaps in a case of conservation of punctuation, it was removed from old-fashion:
What once was incorrect but intelligible now makes absolutely no sense.
Yahoo! Shine has been kind enough to provide some links to recipes for popular foods:
If only the writer had paid more attention to the recipe names. Then lattice-topped would have gotten its hyphen and old-fashioned would be spelled completely. And more important, Taste of Home would have gotten due credit for the apple crisp recipe.
You start with multiple typos in a single sentence, like this from Yahoo! Shine:
Then you take a recipe from another source (like the popular Web site Cravings) and neglect to give it credit. In the process of “borrowing” the recipe, you mistake 3 pounds of lobster with 3-pound lobsters. And finally, you fail to “borrow” the entire instructions. As bad as those errors are, nothing infuriates an editor more than unattributed text.
Terribly Write 