Sometimes the number and variety of errors made by a professional writer are so enormous that I just have to admire the creativity that must have gone into producing them. The result includes some errors I’ve never seen before as well as the usual, garden variety gaffes we find every day on Yahoo! Shine.
Of course, those gaffes include the misplaced comma (in the U.S., it goes before the closing quotation mark), the mismatched subject and verb (feature should be features), and an unnecessary comma:
No article on Shine would be complete without a misspelled name (that should be Nefera de Nile) and a misplaced modifier:
Just so that you’re absotutely, posilively sure you know that a quote is coming from Cathy Cline, the writer repeats that info. Normally, a writer gives the titles of movies and TV shows some sort of special treatment, like italic or quotation marks. Not this writer! That stuff’s for writers who don’t trust their readers to know a title from their elbow. With thinking like that (and an extra word or two), this writer is going to become super-successful:
Here’s one of those errors I’ve never seen before: the possessive of the plural dolls. I guess this gal didn’t know if the apostrophe goes before or after the S, so she put it both before and after. Clever, no? She’s also unfamiliar with the correct handling of quotes within quotations. The inner quoted material should be surrounded by single quotation marks, not double. That’s one punctuation rule that seems to have eluded our writer. And the difference between allude (which means “to refer to”) and elude (which means “to escape or evade”) has definitely eluded her. She’s also not too good with copying information. If she had just used Copy and Paste commands on the Barbie website, she wouldn’t have to rely on her faulty memory. There’s no Sleepover Barbie. It’s Slumber Party Barbie. Oh, and that comma doesn’t belong there:
Wowser. I was willing to let the whole dolls’s thing slide as a simple typo until I saw this:
This writer is really struggling with English. She’s got a real problem with pronouns. The antecedent of the pronoun they appears to missing. Did she think that it could possibly refer to company, which in the U.S. is singular?
It’s no surprise that the writer throws in another extraneous comma; gives up on trying to form the possessive of dolls, and instead goes for the possessive of the singular doll, even though the sentence requires the plural; and puts a hyphen in oversized:
Old errors, new errors. This article has some of everything. Unfortunately.
Terribly Write 