What’s your style?

If you’re a writer, editor, blogger, or just someone interested in writing in excruciatingly correct English, you might have occasion to refer to a style guide. A style guide can be an internal company document or a public publication, like the Associated Press Stylebook. Many media companies use the AP guide as the definitive source of spelling, capitalization, word choice, and the like. But not Yahoo News, apparently.

According to AP style, cabinet should be capitalized when referring to the president’s advisers, and not to a piece of furniture. (Other authorities, such as the Government Printing Office and the New York Times, recommend capitalizing the word in that context.) But ultimately it’s a matter of house style. So, I’ll give that one a pass.

Not getting a pass? The use of him instead of the reflexive pronoun himself. (When the subject and the pronoun refer to the same person, use a reflexive pronoun, which ends with self or selves.)  And obviously, the doubled and in and and.

To whom it may concern

I wonder if Yahoo! Style has editors and writers who have shared information about the difference between nominative and objective pronouns. I think not:

The nominative pronoun who can be the subject of a verb like, oh, say, maybe have shared. The objective pronoun whom can be the object of a verb or preposition, like “to whom it may concern” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.”

I have a question

I have a question for the editors at Yahoo! Finance: Who the heck edited this? Anyone?

Am I supposed to mail my taxes to Yahoo!? Not a chance. If the intent was to tell readers to email a question, then them should be it.

A message to whoever wrote this

This is a message to whoever wrote this for Yahoo! Finance: You used the wrong pronoun.

Although it looks like you’re dealing with the object of the preposition to, you’re not. The entire clause starting with whomever lasts… is the object of the preposition. The writer should have used whoever, which is the subject of the verb lasts.

Here’s a good rule from grammarbook.com:

The presence of whoever or whomever indicates a dependent clause. Use whoever or whomever to agree with the verb in that dependent clause, regardless of the rest of the sentence.

Throw it back

There are so many things wrong with this paragraph from Yahoo! Style that if I were writer’s editor, I’d throw it back at her and say, “Try again, honey. It’s not worth my time to try to fix this.”

Is it really that bad? Yes. Yes, it is. An editor could change the pronouns their and they to its and it, since they seem to refer to Milan. And an editor could add the word the before Milanese’s and change that to the plural possessive Milaneses’. But the sentence still wouldn’t make any sense. It’s a straight-up (notice the hyphen?) mess. It’s a throwback (notice it’s one word?) to the days of our youth, before we knew about grammar and spelling and punctuation and sentences with actual verbs.

But that’s not all. The Cure should be The Cure’s and the random capitalization of some of those song titles has me scratching my head and dusting the dandruff off my keyboard. And the noun throwback is still one word.

Nice try. But wrong

Looks like this Yahoo! Style writer was trying to be excruciatingly correct, but wound up being completely wrong:

The word she should have used is whoever, because it’s the subject of the verb wears.

If you’re unsure if you should use who or whom (or whoever or whomever), go with who (or whoever). You’ve got a 50-50 chance of being correct. If you use whom or whomever and you’re wrong, you look like a pretentious high school dropout.

A daughter and their dorms

When writers drop their article off at their editor’s desk, the last thing they want to think about is the likelihood of its containing grammatical errors. At least one Yahoo! Beauty didn’t think about grammar (or her reader) when she wrote this:

According to that excerpt, parents — not the daughter — are the ones living at dorms — not a dorm. It takes a special kind of determined reader (like moi) to try to decipher that sentence and ascertain what caused the train wreck. It’s pretty simple: the wrong pronoun (it should be her, not their) and a wrong plural (it should be dorm).

It was bound to happen

When it became acceptable (at least in some circles) to use the pronouns they, their, and them to refer to an individual of unknown gender, it was bound to happen: Those same plural pronouns would be used when a singular pronoun is required. It happened on yahoo.com:

The pronoun their refers to one of two candidates, both of whom are purported to be male. The correct pronoun is the singular his.

Women and her lifetime

Will Yahoo! Style writers make the same mistakes throughout their lifetime? Will they fail to understand that a plural noun (like women) requires a plural pronoun (like their)?

An editor needed for he

A Yahoo! TV writer demonstrates the need for an editor with a single word:

A competent editor for him might point out that the objective case, not the subjective case, is correct for the object of a preposition like for.