I’m soooo confused by Yahoo News. What were the things that “were limited”?
To me it looks like the editors were limited in their proofreading skills. And the readers? We’re limited in our comprehension, due to a missing apostrophe.
Punctuation matters.
If I had a nickel for every error on yahoo.com, I’d have millions of dollars’ worth of nickels.
If I had a nickel for every missing apostrophe on Yahoo!, I’d have a lot of nickels.
It looks like someone at yahoo.com is a tad confused. The president of France is François Hollande. Holland is another name for the Netherlands.
Here’s a thought for the “market editor” for Yahoo! Style: Invest about two months’ rent in a grammar class.
You might learn something that would benefit you in your job, such as the use of an apostrophe in a quasi-possessive like two weeks’ pay, one day’s rest, and six years’ experience.
Let’s change this word on Yahoo! Parenting so that it’s correct:
It needs an apostrophe to indicate the omission of a letter. Few people (especially those under the age of a dinosaur) know that let’s is a contraction of let us.
Few things irk me more than really bad writing by people who are paid to write. Unless it’s management that allows really bad writing to be published. And one indication of bad writing is the amount of red ink I bleed on a page. So, this article from Yahoo! Style is really bad and I’m really irked.
Omitting a hyphen from an age is a relatively minor, but totally unnecessary, mistake:
Using the wrong word? Not minor mistake in my opinion, although I alternately agree and disagree that the writer should be taken out behind to the woodshed:
It’s hard to imagine a writer confusing alternatively with alternately. With mistakes like that, this writer will never receive the acclaim of legitimate writers, unless she acquires the services of a competent editor:
Her word choice continues to be sketchy at best: No, didgeridoos and balalaikas are not a few instruments, they are two instruments:
More red ink! I need more red ink! Or at least an explanation for why there’s a the in front of Bush’s mystique but none in front of performer, why she didn’t put the only in front of the word it modifies (which is one), why it’s not an accidental death, and why this writer can’t match a verb (which should be have kept) to its subject:
Just how old is a bohemian? And is a “slight bohemian age” like dog-years?
I guess we should expect a writer who doesn’t know the difference between a bohemian age and a bohemian edge to care about spelling a name correctly, like Clare Waight Keller:
Are you still with me? If so, then you got to the best of the worst word usages of all times: the blouses with the bellowing sleeves. I’ve heard of loud prints, but never loud sleeves. I wonder if they’re red.
I don’t know how they do it! Those creative Hollywood types manage to get a beige coat and knee-high boots to play a Columbia professor:
If I were the cynical type, I might think that sentence is a tad misleading. And full of errors. Fact is, Julianne Moore plays the professor; the coat and boots don’t even have a speaking part in the movie. The boots are actually knee-high and the coat and boots give Julianne her academic look.
To make that sentence somewhat intelligible, you have to get rid of the misplaced modifier (that’s the phrase at the beginning of the sentence) by moving the word it modifies:
Playing a Columbia professor who is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, Julianne gets her academic look from the beige coat and knee-high boots.
So, the writer for Yahoo! Shine is creating a headline slash photo caption and doesn’t look at the photo? That’s what it looks like to me:
If only the writer had considered that maybe, perhaps, perchance the apostrophe in the picture is correct, then maybe, perhaps, perchance there’d be one in the headline/caption. Ya’ think?
Readers’ opinion of this is a little different from most yahoo.com staffers’.
The comparison that’s here is between an 11-year-old’s first day of school and most kids. But it should be between an 11-year-old’s first day of school and most kids’ first day of school. To accomplish that, the writer should have included an apostrophe with kids. And should have used “different from” instead of “different than.”
If you think that a hyphen doesn’t carry much weight in writing, think again. Readers of Yahoo! Shine are treated to real-life proof that the silly little mark can change 18-year-old embryos into 18 one-year-old embryos:
And omitting the hyphen isn’t the only boneheaded mistake the writer made. According to the article, the woman in question used two 19-year-old frozen embryos. But now I quibble.
Terribly Write 