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Category Archives: Scary reads

Safety walk in bathtubs?

Monday, August 15, 2011

Let me start by saying that I don’t know why Gmail is showing me ads for walk-in tubs (maybe it can tell how hobbled I still am from the major hike I did on the weekend?), but good heavens, this ad has a lot of errors crammed in to one small space:
Safety Walk in Bathtubs [...]

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Commas matter. Really.

Thursday, November 18, 2010

I saw a headline on a facebook ad today that made me do a double-take. It said “Stop Renting Girlfriend!” I wondered what kind of service this could possibly be for, then quickly realized that what the ad meant to say was “Stop Renting, Girlfriend!” It was an ad for a condo development. I’m sure [...]

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Ever wonder exactly what editors do?

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Vanity Fair has taken a jab at Sarah Palin by setting its editorial staff to work on her resignation speech. The point of the excercise from VF’s perspective, of course, was to further hammer home a point that has been made many times already — the speech had some issues. I’m posting their work here [...]

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More Signs on Trial

Monday, May 4, 2009

I’ve posted before about the terrible grammar, spelling, and punctuation I’ve seen on signs. The problem does not seem to be going away.
Exhibit 1: The bizarrely specific
On the door of a fast-food joint, a sign read:
“No live animals allowed”
I’m not sure why they felt the need to specify that only “live” animals are banned. Perhaps [...]

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Spell check won’t save you from all mistakes, but it does catch some biggies…

Friday, February 13, 2009

Like this subject line, which arrived in my inbox today:
 Yak is bringing more jobs ot Canada!
Ot Canada, eh?

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Watch your loaded language

Monday, January 5, 2009

Besides the terrible image quality (my fault — no proper camera nearby), what’s wrong with this ad for a Clarins free gift promotion at Sears?

While it is nice that the promotion allows you to choose one of four different skin-care sets, the phrase “right to choose” is entirely inappropriate here.
Why? It’s loaded language. It’s [...]

Filed in Cautionary tales, Scary reads | Comments (1)

Further proof that headlines are the most common place for errors

Thursday, August 14, 2008

Yahoo! News: Entertainment News – Trump to buy McMahon’s home, let him leave there (AP) 
 
Um, let him *leave* there? Surely enough, clicking through to the story reveals that, in fact, Trump will let McMahon *live* there (which is essentially the opposite of leaving).

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Maybe “you” should learn what quotation marks are for…

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Again, I must say that I understand Internet advertising may be an unfair place to go looking for grammatical and punctuation screw-ups. But still — I couldn’t ignore this ad:

What on earth does the person who wrote this ad think those quotation marks mean? Probably the same thing as the guy who wrote the [...]

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And you want me to take your IQ test?

Thursday, June 26, 2008

I’ll admit that Internet advertising banners are not necessarily expected to adhere to the strictest rules of spelling and grammar.
But surely if you expect me to have any interest in your “IQ Quiz,” you should at least know when to use “a” and when to use “an”… and that’s as far as I’m going to [...]

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Beaconicity? A non-word? C’mon now…

Sunday, June 22, 2008

As an editor, I am firmly opposed to using a five-syllable word when there’s a perfectly good one- or two-syllable one that says exactly what you mean, especially when it can make your meaning less clear.
So I offer my enthusiastic congratulations to the Local Government Association, a group that represents city councils in the UK, [...]

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