After reading this

After reading this, I realized that the Yahoo! Style writer doesn’t know what a dangling participle is:

According to that sentence, paramedics revived the child — which would be a little challenging since they allegedly performed that miracle after arriving at her location.

The dangling participial phrase “after reviving the child” requires a subject, which the reader expects to find immediately after the phrase. Thus, the writer (and her accomplice, the editor) told us it was paramedics. The correct wording would be something like: After the officer revived the child.

The only publicly misused punctuation

OK, so I lied. There is no single punctuation character that is publicly misused. Every punctuation character is misused in public, especially on Yahoo!. This time the punctuation is a hyphen and the site is Yahoo! Finance:

The rule: Don’t put a hyphen between an adverb ending in -LY and the word it modifies.

Who stitched this together?

Whoever stitched together this sentence for Yahoo! Sports did a pretty good job, if you ignore the misspelling and the missing hyphen in the compound adjective gruesome-looking:

Uniquely unprepared to edit

The editors at the Yahoo! front page seem uniquely unqualified to perform their jobs. They just can’t remember that there’s no hyphen between an adverb ending in -LY (like, oh, say, maybe uniquely) and the word that follows it:

Carefully editing planning was necessary

Here’s what the folks at Yahoo! Style could use: Some carefully planned editing. Or at least careful proofreading so that an adjective, and not an adverb, is used to modify a noun:

Nice try, but wrong

I gotta give the Yahoo! Celebrity writer credit for trying to use hyphens in a compound modifier. But not too much credit, because he got it wrong:

He tried to combine “five-second to eight-second technical issue,” which is admirable. But the result isn’t quite right. The correct use of hyphens is: five- to eight-second technical issue.

Dis-graceful

If this were written by a third-grader, the mistakes might be understandable. But coming from a professional writer for Yahoo! Style, they’re downright disgraceful:

Someone writing about fashion should know that paillettes needs two L’s; they are a type of sequin. And when the plural word is the subject of the sentence, it requires a plural subject. And Lord help her (because no one at Yahoo! will), the writer actually thinks that graceful is a suitable modifier for the verb floats. It is not; the adverb gracefully is.

Make your own candle holder holder

Even if the writer for Yahoo! Makers managed to spell Smoky Mountain correctly, this brief excerpt would be problematic:

Why did she use the adverb cheaply? It apparently modifies available, but have you ever heard of anything that was “cheaply available,” and not merely cheap?

But the worst mistake is the terminology she used to describe this DIY project. She calls the objects “candlestick holders,” but candlesticks are candle holders. So, you’d be making holders for candle holders. She’s obviously confused a candle with a candlestick.

What were the outfits wearing?

I have a question for the writer for Yahoo! Celebrity: What does a scantily clad outfit wear?

And I have another question: Why is there a hyphen between the adverb scantily and the word it modifies (clad)? And one more question: Was Ms. Jenner scantily clad or were her outfits?

Did it immediately kick in?

Did your inner Grammar Cop immediately kick in when you read this from the Yahoo! front page?