Do you remember anything from third grade? If you’re this Yahoo! Makers writer, the answer would be, “not so much.” She apparently forgot how to form the plural of a noun (hint: it generally doesn’t include an apostrophe) and she forgot that valentine is not capitalized when you’re referring to a card:
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?
Why are apostrophes so difficult for some people? I don’t get it, ’cause I think they’re pretty simple to use. You know that an apostrophe can be used in contractions to signal the omission of a letter, such as isn’t (for is not) and don’t (for do not). They’re sometimes used at the beginning or end of a word to indicate a letter that’s been dropped off, if you’re followin’ me. So what letter did the writer for Yahoo! News think was omitted from tis’?
‘Tis clear to me that the writer doesn’t know that ’tis is a contraction of it is and that tis’ makes no sense.
The writer for Yahoo! Style seems to think that she gets to decide where to place hyphens in the spelling of Charles de Gaulle Airport. She is mistaken:
There are no hyphens there. But there is a capital letter in Airport (it’s part of the airport’s name, after all), and there’s a preferred spelling of cozy, which the writer preferred not to use.
If you heard the pope’s address to the United States Congress, you might have thought he highlighted unity and dialogue. But you would be wrong. The speech featured something like unity, but isn’t really unity, and something that might be called dialogue, but isn’t really dialogue. At least that’s how I interpret the quotation marks on the Yahoo! front page:
Another interpretation is that the writer really has no idea when to use those pesky little marks.
What was the Yahoo! Style writer drinking when she wrote this? A bevvy? (That’s a drink. An alcoholic one.)
There’s practically a bevy of minor mistakes there. Nothing serious, but enough to detract from the writing. Besides the misspelling, there’s the incorrect hyphen after an adverb ending in -LY and the use of a instead of an.
Where in the world did the question mark go in this headline from Yahoo! Travel?
When you’re looking for reliable information about investing, finance, or business, what website do you turn to? Yahoo! Finance? If you’re like most people, you’re adversely influenced by the number of mistakes, no matter how minor, you find. Typos, misspellings, and grammar mistakes all erode the credibility of a website or an article.
So, how credible do you find this article, where the writer apparently knew she needed an apostrophe in the first sentence, but couldn’t figure out where? Or that she’s a little skimpy when it comes to her hyphen usage?
(Omitting the hyphens in an age is one of the top 3 hyphen errors you’ll find on Yahoo!.)
I really think that if you’re going to write about finance and business for adults, you need to know the difference between a product (oh, like, say a Barbie doll) and a manufacturer (like Mantel). I’m pretty sure that even though Barbie is a pretty smart, yet plastic cookie, she did not release a doll:
Perhaps to prove that she is completely uninterested in the correct use of punctuation, the writer throws in some random and thoroughly incorrect commas. But I’ll admit to one positive note: The writer has got me interested in seeing those ads where the Chinese actress stares, presumably at the camera:
Using a hyphen correctly is harder than you think. At least it’s too hard for the Yahoo! Style editors:
If you’re writing an age, use two hyphens (12-year-old boy) unless you’re using the word years (he’s 12 years old).
I lied. This use of the hyphen on the Yahoo! front page is not new; in fact, this mistake happens every day on Yahoo!:
There’s no reason to put a hyphen between an adverb ending in -LY and the word that it modifies. The suffix -LY is the signal to the reader that the adverb modifies the word that follows it.
Terribly Write 