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:
Clash of styles
April 21, 2014 — LauraWhat do you do when you come up against a clash of styles? I’m not talking about wearing Birkenstocks with a prom gown, I’m talking about writing and trying to follow conflicting editorial guidelines. Case in point (or case and point, as one Yahoo! writer would say), this age on the Yahoo! front page:
If you follow Associated Press style, you’d use numerals (not words) for the age of a person. But AP style also recommends not starting a sentence with numerals (except if the numerals are a year). If you write out the age correctly, it would be: Forty-nine-year-old. That’s a lot of hyphens. And it would violate the rule requiring numerals for the age of a person. So that would be: 49-year-old. But numerals can’t go at the beginning of a sentence.
I’m starting to feel a little dizzy.
What to do? Recast the sentence, of course! You’ll get a shorter sentence that’s easier to read without all those hyphens:
Bernard Hopkins, 49, seeks a historic bout…
What’s the difference?
September 17, 2013 — LauraWhat’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?
Don Johnson attends premiere of ‘Don Johnson’
September 15, 2013 — LauraWell, hello, Miss Steele.
That’s the way this opening on Yahoo! Movies should have been punctuated if you’re an old-school punctuationist:
That’s not the only punctuation problem in this excerpt: There’s the period outside the quotation marks (in the U.S., it goes before the closing quote) and the missing hyphen in 23-year-old. And while we’re talking errors, how about that extra word in “attended to”? Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith attended the premiere of “Don Johnson.” I wonder if it’s anything like the recently premiered “Don Jon.”
Censoring motion
July 22, 2013 — LauraThe best way to describe this paragraph on Yahoo! Shine is awkward. And wrong:
If a motion censor detects your presence, it’s gonna stop you in your tracks. Of course, it might take the use of a motion sensor to detect your presence, which might pass the info on to the censor.
There’s no need for the hyphens here:
Hyphens are used in expressions like “13-year-old,” but not “13 years old.” It’s like the difference between writing “2-foot-long snake” and “a snake 2 feet long.”
I’m pretty sure if the man was proposing, he’d have an engagement in his pocket. But I could be wrong:
Burly armpits and legs
July 15, 2013 — LauraAn article on Yahoo! Shine about women’s body hair presented some hairy problems for the writer — most notably when it came to writing numbers:
The writer has no clue how to write an age or a span of ages. It should be “18- to 24-year-olds” (or “those 18 to 24 years old”). And she doesn’t know that fractions, when written out, require a hyphen, like this: two-thirds.
The plural of the abbreviation STD is STDs. Notice the lack of an apostrophe. Except here, of course:
You might wonder why the writer changed the subject from women’s body hair to women showing off their muscular pits and legs. (And just how does one get a burly armpit?)
I don’t think the writer meant to change the subject. I believe she’s so vocabulary-challenged that she thinks that burly means hairy or unshaven. Normally, I advise writers with limited vocabularies not to try to stretch them by using big words that aren’t part of their everyday speech. But I never, ever would have predicted that any professional writer — even one who worked for Yahoo! — didn’t know what burly meant.
A 5-year-old would know better
May 15, 2013 — LauraEven a 5-year-old would know that there’s a hyphen missing from this caption on Yahoo! Shine:
Even 10- and 11-year-olds know better
September 25, 2012 — LauraIf you’re trying to save words (and who isn’t trying to save these days), you might consider shortening the phrase “10-year-olds and 11-year-olds.” And that’s a good thing, as long as you don’t do it the way the writer on yahoo.com did:
What’s missing here is a hyphen, called a suspensive hyphen, to indicate that the number 10 is connected to “year-olds” in the same way that the number 11 is. The correct phrase is: 10- and 11-year-olds. And be sure to include that space after the suspensive hyphen.
A very unfit 19-year-old
August 20, 2012 — LauraPunctuation 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:
At what cost?
May 13, 2012 — LauraIf there were just a single typo on the Yahoo! front page, I’d probably overlook it. But if you see this many mistakes, ya’ just gotta wonder what’s going on at the Internet giant.
Why can’t the writers or editors spell Spider-Man?
Why would a professional writer use an apostrophe for a simple plural?
Who would think there should be hyphens in 3 years old? (But there are hyphens in 3-year-old.)
Why would someone put a hyphen between an adverb ending in LY and the word it modifies?
Was someone in a hurry when they wrote this?
Sure, you can get pound out lots of headlines if you don’t take the time to proofread, but at what cost?
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