How would you plead if you were accused of writing this excerpt, which appeared on Yahoo! News?
Guilty of using the present tense of plead instead of the past tense? Guilty of thinking you were using the past tense of plead? Guilty of not knowing that the past tense is pleaded or pled?
The senior political reporter for Yahoo! News‘ “The Ticket” should plead guilty to a grammatical felony for this goofy verb tense:
Creating a new past tense for a verb seems to be a trend at Yahoo!. Or else it’s just the result of writers who are grammatically impaired. The past tense of plead is pleaded or pled, not plead.
But that’s not the worst crime in this article about John Edwards. It’s the allegation that the former senator faces a $250,000 charge per fine:
Looks like she’s having a little problem with the words of order.
Looks like the writer for the blog of the Yahoo! Newsroom coasted through today’s assignment. When it refers to the U.S. region bordering the Atlantic Ocean, East Coast deserves two capital letters:
In this sentence, either which should be that or a town should be deleted:
There’s another choice the writer should have made: pleaded or pled, two acceptable past tenses of the verb plead. At least the writer spelled the past tense of receive correctly, though the verb should be receive.
I don’t know what the heck to make of this on Yahoo! Shine:
Did the writer mean pleads? Or the past tense of plead, which is pleaded (the preferred word) or pled (which is also acceptable)?
Terribly Write 