Something smells all that bad

Looks like everyone is having trouble with the Enter key over at Yahoo! News. It keeps adding blank lines:

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I wonder what word is missing. I think it was supposed to be “things didn’t smell all that bad.” But I’d think that a professional journalist writing for the Web would have said simply, “things didn’t smell bad.”

But the writers at Yahoo! aren’t known for their concise wording. Sometimes they like a word so much, they repeat it:

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And if they don’t like a word, they may just misspell it:

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But really, things don’t smell that bad, do they? Were you actually expecting perfection from Yahoo!?

That’s about per for the course

Once again displaying a disregard for grammar, a journalist for Yahoo! News mistakes whom for the correct word and a hyphen for a dash:

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There’s no explaining how mistakes like these get passed on to the reader:

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But that’s about par for the course at Yahoo! Also common is the use of the hyphen when a dash is required. At least the writer tried to include the HTML symbol for an em dash, but failed. But that’s not the worst of this mess. I’d say forgetting to complete a sentence is a high crime in journalism:

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Mistakes like this can be really damaging to a news source’s reputation:

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It would be damaging, that is, if anyone considered Yahoo! a reliable source of news.

This mistake causes headaches

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