Edit Nation Blog

The Most Epic Final Battles Every FoughtRanker And can't spell, either. How much would you trust the information from a site that can't get its caption right?

Ad HealthZap Dog Saves Pregnant Owner By Smelling Her Belly At first, no one was able to understand the reason behind this dog’s weird behavior but when they did, it changed them as a person forever. Dog Wont Stop Braking At Pregnant Owner; Shocking HealthZap Just by...

Answer: No one. Take a look! See some seriously sloppy editing. Mistakes all over the place. At Forbes! Forbes! Many successful people attribute at least part of their success to having a mentor. The right mentor can provide advice and connections that help their...

It's been my observation that the most common mistake in American English is the old it's versus its mistake. Turns out, it's a pretty common mistake in British English too! And this from a "educational" website; just one of several British English punctuation,...

Do you enjoy reading biography? Then run, don't walk, to abebooks.com and pick up a copy of Madame An Intimate Biography of Helena Rubinstein, by Patrick O'Higgins. The story is terrific, but the writing...my dears, the writing is outstanding. Out. Standing. The first...

Ah, the joys of reading CNN.com. I appreciate CNN. I do. But, a lot of the time, its punctuation leaves something to be desired. Or, in the case below, its punctuation left something out. Here's the sentence: The princess is a well-known international figure, being...

It's not particularly funny when you arrive at the website of a so-called "association" of writers and find beaucoup mistakes. It just isn't. Here are a couple of easy-to-spot mistakes on one group's introductory, thanks-for-joining email. The Florida Writer’s...

Every community has its spelling vagaries. Here in Sarasota, we have two community "secrets" that, if you don't know them, will immediately expose you to laughter and ridicule. The first is that Michael Saunders is a woman. There's that old story that goes around...

Listen, when someone proclaims that he or she is an "editor" of any stripe, give that person a little credit. No matter what, we give you carefully considered writing. Let me put it another way: If you find a mistake in my writing and tell me, you are my new best...

It really is discouraging to read writing like the three examples below. I'm just going to paste and comment. Members of the organization that have attended these conferences in the past know what a great learning experience the writer gets from attending. I just cut...

As the kids say, OMG. I've seen a lot of jaw-droppingly bad writing coming out of WordPress WordCamps. A. Lot. But this, this takes the cake. Just cast your eyes over this amazingly, appallingly bad bio from the Miami WordCamp site. I'm not sure if it's a joke, but I...

Man, I just love it when I get an invite to connect through LinkedIn and (since my mamma didn't raise no dummy) I go to that person's profile and find that this invite is a thinly veiled come-on to buy something. It's just too fun when that happens, and it puts me in...

I met some very nice people at the Franchise Expo, sincere people who are sincerely committed to their concept and sincerely convinced that it'll make them (and you!) a million bucks or more. A lot of these sincere people have very snazzy, big-bucks websites (as...

As an editor, people ask me all the time about the number one rule of good writing. That’s easy. It’s so easy, in fact, that it’s the very same rule for the millions of striving attorneys as it is for the lonely (but optimistic!) Zamboni repair service. No, it’s not...

Welllll, when I say "funny," I really mean the opposite. There was nothing funny about the writing I observed at this weekend's Franchise Expo in Ft. Lauderdale. I suppose it was a good thing, since it proves my point—as if I needed any proof!—that business people...

LinkedIn "Learning" stinks. LinkedIn "Learning," at least as far as American English goes, is jaw-droppingly horrible. I think I already said that—somewhere, sometime, and if I didn't, I meant to!—but I continue to get emails from LinkedIn, and those emails continue...

There are three C's to good writing: you have to be correct, you have to use compelling language, and you have to be consistent. Consistency is the big bugaboo for businesses. It's amazing to me how often I'll come across a business whose very name varies from page to...

Hey, this is easy. Parentheses are used to create an aside to the reader, and are less of a break than dashes, but more profound than the break created by a comma or commas. And, unlike commas or dashes, parentheses only come in pairs. Though the decision whether or...

Gee, why bother to breathe? When you use your language with authority, then by gosh and by golly, you look like an authority. With authority comes credibility, and with credibility comes that most important coin: trust. A couple of weeks ago, I took my car to a car...

The second main use of the semicolon is to separate items in a list when one item has its own comma. For example: My favorite books are Gone With the Wind, Alas, Babylon, and The Bronze Bow. How many books are in that list? Three? Four? Not sure? It helps to remember...

There are two main uses of the semicolon (;): to join two complete sentences without benefit of a conjunction, and to separate items in a list when one (or more) of the items has a comma of its own. In the first use, the trick is to imagine a see-saw. (Do we still...

Yes, it's official! I have publicly declared my love for YouTube star Randy Rainbow in The New York Times! Permalink: https://nyti.ms/2NdtCe5#permid=28486337 If you don't know Randy, you need to! "Hey, USA we just elected us a mean girl!" Genius!! Here are YouTube.com...

Question: If someone advertised that he (or she!) is a WordPress "expert" and a "business adviser," but misspelled the word "adviser," would you have any confidence whatsoever that his (or her!) advice would be worth, well, anything? Answer: Hell, no! But, gee, that's...

I know a lot of people—and a lot of people I respect, a lot—think that LinkedIn is the greatest thing since sliced bread. While I've never been enamored of the whole "connectedness" thing and the thought of having a million billion "followers" makes me feel like...

Geeky-editing-post-about-commas alert! I just came across these two sentences on the B&N website, ironically on one of its "here's-how-you-put-your-books-in-our-stores pages." The annual, "The Writer's Market", is also stocked by most bookstores and libraries and...

What a terrific example of the suspended hyphen rule, compliments of The New York Times: The older Tom Cruise gets, the more fun it is to watch him risk death in elaborate age- and gravity-defying ways.

Yours in good grammar: The Space Makes the Case! A “breakthrough” is defined as “a significant or sudden advance, development, or achievement that removes a barrier to progress; a person’s first success.” “Breakthrough” is one of a group of words, like cleanup, login,...

These sentences are part of the 52-sentence group I pulled from a local "WordPress expert's" site. I'm all for WordPress, and I understand that it's "open source, " etc., etc., etc., and that lots and lots of very cool people have flocked to the WordPress banner, but...

Oh, I'm so happy to have my blog back. What an ordeal! Yippee! Okay, here we have a wonderful, stupendous quiz, featuring material from the same website and, get this, this is a WordPress developer's website! God only knows what his and her clients' websites look...

I admit to being grumpy about not being chosen to present at the National Speakers Association's Influence 2018. However, I would take some comfort if I felt that the three women in the 3-woman panel chosen to present about "Authorship" were as good as or better than...