Huh?

One way on Willy Street learn more about the project that could snarl traffic and impact businesses.


Could you please rephrase that in the form of a thought that makes sense?

Cracker Jacks

Atlanta is a pretty kickass place. We got free tickets to a Braves game. Good tickets. Like in one of the sections where you get a waiter. True story: the food is cheaper in those sections. The second game we saw was pretty awesome too--at one point the Braves had two 93s on the field. The scoreboard reported one player's number as -1 and also reported at one point that a player with the last name of 2B was playing the position of 3B. I'm pretty sure they just gave up after the 7th inning or so. 

Also kickass: vegan soul food. No kidding. I had vegan macaroni and cheese that was one of the awesomest things I've ever eaten. It really makes me wish Madison had vegans. Or black people. 

OMG!

http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/03/25/oxford.new.words/index.html?eref=mrss_igoogle_cnn

OMG, I heart those guys at the Oxford English Dictionary so much!

Whoa

Here's today's funny:


If you get up in the morning and say, “Whoa is me,” you’ve got a problem. 

Graters and stuff

Why is the word "grateful" spelled like that? Shouldn't it be "greatful"? The spelling of "grateful" kind of makes me think of cheese graters. I don't want to be full of that.

Today's headline

What's Wrong With My Snake?

Fun with headlines!

I've decided to dedicate an entire section to errors in headlines. A headline is the single most important part of a news story. If you have a shitty headline, no one will read your article. You'd think people could at least stop to edit their headlines, if nothing else, but alas, this is not the case. Today's edition:

Yemen's defies calls for him to quit. 

I actually had to read this a couple of times to figure out what it was trying to say. Is there a word missing? Is "defies" supposed to be a different word? Should the writer have spent 0.5 seconds double-checking his headline before submitting his story? 

If you come across any awesome headlines or other atrocious writing, send it my way so I can share in your joy or wrath or whatever emotion other people's failure brings you. GrammarChick at gmx.com

A perspective client

Perspective: point of view (noun)
Prospective: potential (adjective)

You cannot have a perspective client. "Perspective" is not an adjective, and it does not make sense in this context. You can have a prospective client, and you can look at a situation from a client's perspective, but you cannot have a perspective client.

That is all.

The case of Brackets v. Parentheses

It was brought to my attention that in my last post I was wrong about the use of brackets, so let's have a little lesson, shall we?


Here's the paragraph in question:


"The drums went by my house. I didn't know about (the protest) until then, so we jumped up, hung up on the phone with my aunt, and jumped in,” said Elise Taft.


My argument (and one I considered to be relatively nitpicky) was that the use of parentheses was incorrect in this case, as brackets are usually used when you're changing a quote like this.

No reporter bias

Just to show I have no reporter bias, here's an article written by someone I had not previously belittled. That is about to change.


Demonstrations are still going strong in Wisconsin. Hundreds of protesters rallied Monday afternoon in the Village of Mount Horeb.


At this point I'm thinking it's going to be a good article. This guy has successfully put a sentence together. Impressive.

Today's quotable moment

There were so many memorable features, I can't remember them all.

Amount of people

This one is absolutely rampant. I really hadn't noticed it that much until recently, and now it's like everyone is doing it wrong all the time just to taunt me. So prepare to learn, people.

"Amount" is only used with something that cannot be quantified in numbers.

I have a large amount of happiness.

I have a large amount of money.

You could argue that "money" can be counted in numbers, which would be true, except we're not specifying how to count it. It's a generic term, not a specific form of money like dollars, euros, pesos, caps, goats, or whatever other form of money you feel like using. For terms like this, you use "amount."

Chemistry lesson

Instead of a grammar lesson today, let's have a chemistry lesson! Please enjoy this informative piece about sodium, won't you?

New tradition

We all need some fun in our lives, so please enjoy this first installment of Stuff People Actually Wrote!

Today's edition is from the summary of a survey about customer service at a department store:

I left the store with a feeling that I was leaving my family. It was quite enjoyable.

The codependency of commas and conjunctions

Okay, so you know how you always use a comma and a conjunction to join two complete sentences? That doesn't mean that you use a comma every single time you come across one of the conjunction words. When they are not being used to join two separate sentences, they do not require commas. They are free to roam the world on their own without always having to follow that stupid comma around.

Just so we're on the same page, let's do a couple of practice sentences. Ready?

More fun with NBC

Another brilliant day at NBC! I'm convinced I'm the only one this entertains, but isn't that the point of a blog anyway? So let's tear apart another horrible article!

The Nothing

This is from www.ReasoningWithVampires.tumblr.com. A friend of mine recommended this blog due to mutual disgust for the atrocious writing in a certain popular fiction series. I found this post to be particularly entertaining:

Now I know my ABC's

We all know you never use an apostrophe to make things plural. Bob the Angry Flower has explained this quite well. I refuse to go into it.

Anyway, there is one exception to this rule. It drives me insane, but there is one exception. Ready? Here goes.

Do do

Stop saying words twice! It does not emphasize your point to say:

I do do that sometimes.

What this does is it makes people giggle and say, "She said 'do do.'"

Another brilliant day at our local NBC affiliate

Here in Wisconsin we have some awesome shit going down. Our governor is nuts, our state government is basically at a standstill, and our journalists are really terrible! Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on journalists. It's really only NBC that sucks, and likely this is more because of the lack of an editor than anything else. But that's not going to stop me from tearing apart horribly written articles!


Governor Walker's budget proposal means big cuts for public schools. Under his proposal, state aid for schools would by cut by almost 9%; that's nearly $900 million. The news has left many school districts around the state reeling.

Oh, fact-checking

Here's one from today's editing adventures:


I spent a couple of years at Harper’s Bizarre in New York, so I was in the fashion and beauty industry for a while.


To be fair, the fashion industry is pretty bizarre.