You might have overlooked the missing hyphen in Lily-Rose Depp’s name in this excerpt from Yahoo! Style:
You might have ignored the misspelling of Métiers d’Arts. But no one could miss 17 years old. It’s just wrong here. It’s OK in “Lily-Rose is 17 years old.” But when used as an adjective, it should be “17-year-old Lily Rose.”
Those wacky Yahoo! Style staffers are at it again. This time they demonstrate that mistakes reign when writing about a 75-year-old (it requires two hyphens):
Maybe next time they’ll hand the reins over to someone who understands English.
I’m not sure what an “18 month daughter” is, but it sounds like some type of temporary arrangement that lasted a year and a half. Coincidentally, this baby on Yahoo! Shine looks like an 18-month-old girl:
The person responsible for this headline/caption on Yahoo! Shine writes like an 11-year-old:
Using a hyphen incorrectly when writing an age is one of the top three hyphen mistakes you’ll find on Yahoo!.
The writer for Yahoo! Sports’ “Prep Rally” didn’t pull off a picture-perfect headline for a story about 5-year-olds:
You just have to wonder what was going through the Yahoo! Shine writer’s head that made her think that twentysomethings was a proper noun:
I wonder what’s so hard about copying the name Center on Education and the Workforce. You don’t have to remember it or know how to spell it. All you have to do is copy it and paste it into the article. I can almost understand not capitalizing mom, though it’s a proper noun in this context. And Wi-Fi is a registered trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance.
There’s no need to capitalize Mr. Carnevale’s title; there is, however, a need to learn to spell millennial:
The number of errors skyrocketed with this excerpt, which includes the split-up skyrocket. The author also confuses a degree with a diploma; a high school graduate has a diploma, not a degree. Again with the capitalized twentysomethings! And then there’s an alleged quote, which I’ll bet you dollars to donuts is really a misquote BECAUSE IT MAKES NO SENSE:
Sorry about the ALL CAPS. I get carried away sometimes when I read something that’s so badly written by a person who is actually paid to write. And especially one who can’t be bothered to spell-check:
Nice try here with the comma. Unfortunately, it’s wrong. It should be a semicolon because the sentence comprises two independent clauses that are not joined by a conjunction:
So, this brings us to the next misspelling of millennials — a spelling that the author clings to like a drowning man clutching an anchor. Perhaps she wouldn’t be so clingy if she bothered to do a spell-check:
There’s an attempt here to use hyphens, but they’re wrong. To show a range of ages, the writer needs hyphens and a space and the word to, like this: 18- to 24-year-old. And that other hyphen is no substitute for a real dash:
I’m just guessin’, but I don’t think the writer has a bachelor’s degree in English:
You just have to wonder how a professional writer can make so many mistakes and still get paid.
What’s the difference between a 160-year-old man and a man who’s 160 years old? Hyphens! At least, that’s the difference everywhere except the Yahoo! front page:
Using (or not using) hyphens with an age is one of the top three hyphen errors you’ll find on Yahoo!.
When Yahoo!’s writers aren’t putting hyphens where they don’t belong, they’re sticking apostrophes in plurals:
The difference between Chevys and Chevy’s is that one is a plural and the other is a possessive.
What’s the difference here? NeNe Leakes likes her name with camel-case. They did it right once, why not twice?
Even a 5-year-old would know that there’s a hyphen missing from this caption on Yahoo! Shine:
You don’t have to be brilliant to know that some writers for Yahoo! Shine aren’t exactly geniuses — at least when it comes to trivial parts of their job, like being able to spell and write with accuracy.
Kaiser Permanente is apparently too difficult for this writer to spell — or even just Google:
She seems to think that the word the is part of a family name (it shouldn’t be capitalized) and that only one person in the family has a lawyer (the apostrophe should be after the S):
Ah! There’s that apostrophe again. This time it’s not there to show possession but to create a plural. Which, of course, is wrong:
The Nikolayevs live in California, so it’s a little odd that their son would be moved to a hospital 3,000 miles away in Stamford, Connecticut. You’d think he’d be taken to Stanford Hospital, which is about 2,950 miles closer to home. But a writer who thinks that Child Protectice Services is a real agency, probably thinks Stamford is in California.
So, she’s obviously convinced you can form the plural of a name with an apostrophe and an S, and she has no idea that when you’re referring to Mom, it gets a capital letter (although if she meant “the mom,” it doesn’t).
And smack-dab in the middle of the article is a link, that the writer gets wrong on two counts: a missing hyphen in 5-year-old and the miscapitalized Mensa — an organization for high-IQ folks. I don’t think this writer is a member.
Punctuation continues to perplex the writers and editors who work on the Yahoo! front page. They just can’t figure out when to use a hyphen. Like here, where they omitted two of those pesky characters in what should be “19-year-old”:
Omitting the hyphens in an age is one of the top three hyphenation mistakes made by Yahoo! staffers. And while I’m on the subject, another frequent hyphenation abomination from Yahoo! is the inclusion of a hyphen after an adverb ending in LY:
Terribly Write 