Sometimes writers just aren’t in the mood to write. Maybe they call it writer’s block. Or maybe they recognize that they’re not invested in the topic. Whatever the reason, the result usually suffers. Perhaps Piper Weiss, the Yahoo! Shine writer responsible for mangling Matthew McConaughey, wasn’t in the mood to check the spelling of his name:
Perchance she thought an editor would supply the missing quotation marks around the movie titles and the missing caps on mom:
And maybe she relied on an editor to remove the incorrect apostrophe and single quotation marks:
If she is the kind of writer who lets boredom affect her pearls, she might skip a word here:
Or turn a verb into some sort of possessive or contraction with an apostrophe:
To compensate, she might capitalize cancer (thinking it’s the Big C, after all). If she’s bored with proofreading, she’d overlook a missing word:
Misspelling director Nancy Meyers’ name is bad, but crediting the writing to someone named Darlene Sloan, when it was Darlene Hunt who created the show, is unforgivable. Unless you’re really uninterested in the topic. Then, mistakes happen:
Her mind might have been on Olympia Snowe or Stephen King when she was thinking about a Maine character. Her concentration perhaps wavered when trying to tap out Gabourey Sidibe. She may have been attempting a pun with white-bred. Unfortunately, in an error-filled article, an attempt at a pun could strike the reader as just another goof. The funky punctuation around size is interesting; quotation marks can be soooo boring:
All right. I just gotta say it: Don’t use alright. Most authorities consider it wrong, except in the most casual of writing:
Minor picky point: If the writer is awake, I’d recommend moving the comma inside the quotation marks, where it belongs:
Clearly the writer is bored. Or uninterested and stuff. If only she were as interested in writing well as she is in writing a lot.
If she were, she’d know that the sentence she wrote must be in the subjective subjunctive mood. Maybe she’s just not in the mood to write or be right.
Terribly Write 