Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Bad punctuation: don't take it lightly


Spotted in Brio magazine. Girl's cruise? How do they decide who the one girl is who gets to go on it?

When I was getting college mail, I remember one college advertising itself as "one of Latino's top choice for college." I seriously regret not calling the admissions office to ask how they managed to make the acquaintance of THE Latino and learn his higher education preferences.

eta: As a commenter on Apostrophe Abuse pointed out, "get-a-way" is also hyphenated incorrectly. (Get which way?)

14 comments:

  1. Forgive me but this a place where "Techie Girl Get's it Right!"

    ^title of one of America's Funniest Home Videos made starring mismatchedsockgirl.

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  2. I may be bad at punctuation but I'm not THAT bad at punctuation!

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  3. oh man, i taught freshman writing all last year, and the mistakes they made were amazing, both in funny and in depressing ways. never do that (the teaching part) if you can avoid it.
    when do you graduate?

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  4. Somnite - Say what? MMSG was on AFHV, really? And she made a punctuation error on it?

    Tobey - I'm a sophomore, class of 2011. I'll keep that in mind, haha.

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  5. Yes, Somnite, I want to hear more about this!

    Have you read Eats, Shoots, and Leaves?

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  6. Q - YES and I thought it was absolutely wonderful.

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  7. Ohhh, talk about a pet peeve. That, and it's versus its. People so seldom get it right, and the sad part is, it's a 50-50 shot even if you just guess. I guess its just an unlucky grammatical feature :-)

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  8. there is simply no excuse good enough for published work that goes unedited!!

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  9. Sorry, MMSG's AFV appearance was through PHAA. It was more like a huge gang up on somnite grammar lecture. It was actually my mistake. Anilee knows.

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  10. mermaid - I could not agree more.

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  11. oh dear, you would think they'd pay a copy editor.

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  12. hi ^^ you dont know me, but i hope its ok if i comment

    lol. niice..im going to pay a lot more attention to my spam mail from now on and find those kind of things

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  13. Hilarious, in a cringe-inducing way! You have to submit this to Apostrophe Abuse. (Can't remember the exact url, but they're really good about posting submissions quickly.)

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  14. Hi, miamaria! Welcome. :)

    Gretchen - Ooh, thanks for pointing me in their direction. I just did!

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