Friday, June 27, 2008

Typo Eradication Advancement League!





Aren't these pictures great? They're from a blog written by a fellow Dartmouth alum named Jeff Deck. He traveled the country for months to find and fix typographical articles. He and his friends call themselves the Typo Eradication Advancement League (TEAL). His website is www.jeffdeck/com/teal.

I also just read the following: Yay!


NEW YORK - The online hangout Facebook is getting more serious about grammar. No more should users see jarringly incorrect declarations such as "Debbie changed their profile picture."


Users who haven't specified their gender in their Facebook profiles will be asked to do so in the coming weeks. That way, Facebook doesn't have to default to "their" or the made-up word "themself," as it had been doing.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Writing retreat!

I'm back from the most wonderful writing retreat weekend with my talented writing partner, Tracy Walton. We holed up in a hotel that was midway between our homes. Other than splitting a bottle of wine in the evening, we did little but WRITE. No distractions and someone I respect to bounce ideas off of right there. It was heaven! Highlights has requested revisions on a non-fiction article, so I worked on that, spent some time on my MG novel, brainstormed plot points for my chapter book and wrote another chapter for it. The only sad part is that Tracy is moving to Florida and I'll miss her terribly. But I'm so happy we had a chance to get together in person and will continue to be writing partners on-line.

Friday, June 20, 2008

Realtor website errors

How would you like to be represented by a real estate agent who has this listed on his/her website? ( haven't even tried to highlight all the punctuation errors.)

Ladera Ranch California is located just south of the incorporated city of Mission Viejo, and is just 2 miles east of Highway 5 along Crown Valley Parkway. Ladera Ranch is an easy commute by car or train to the Irvine and Los Angels job centers. People are attracted to Ladera Ranch due it's unique design and community feel that reminds many residents of simpler times where neighbors walked to and met at the local town center. Ladera is a new master planned self-contained community surrounded by 1,700 acres of rustic hills, lush landscaping and orchards. It broke ground in 1999 with it's first village called Oak Knoll. Now, Ladera Ranch consists of 8 Villages comprising of about 8,100 homes and condos, including 4 apartment communities, and 3 retirement facilities.

Ladera Ranch CA award wining residential architectures incorporate a blend of attached condominiums and detached single family homes. From efficient 1 bedroom, 1 bath condos, up to 6 bedroom, 5 bath, 5,000 square foot estates, and everything in between... one kind find most any property to meet their needs and wants in Ladera Ranch. Please visit the rest of this website to learn more about Ladera Ranch Calif., it's Villages and the ground breaking community amenities. To learn more about detached single family homes, visit: Ladera Ranch Homes. To find out about attached condominiums, visit: Ladera Ranch Condos.


This is from the website of a group of five well-known agents. The rest of the site is similarly embarrassing. (Even the email auto-reply has an error: "Your inquiry has been received and will be responded too promptly.") What does this say about how much (or how little) care an agent might take on contracts worth hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars? And why on earth would agents not hire a reputable copyeditor to look at their site? In this kind of devastating real estate market, it seems incredibly foolish.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

An 8-year-old copyeditor?/Lose vs. Loose

My daughter, who's in second grade, has all the makings of a natural copyeditor. She was outraged recently when a grammar page at school read, "I ate a cookie for "desert." She alerted her teacher, who said she would write the textbook publisher.

Another spelling mistake that's very common, but I can't figure out why: writing "loose" (as in, not tight) when the writer actually means "lose" (as in, not win.) I saw it in instructions in a new badminton set today.

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Children's names in stories

I've been busy with a new client for the past week, and realized I hadn't blogged for a while. Something that struck me as I was critiquing/editing some work of children's writers recently ---the frequent use of names that were popular in the 50's, 60's or even 70's, but that parents almost never name their children now. Examples I've seen include Cindy (plenty of Sydneys out there, but no Cindys anymore, thank goodness. What were my parents thinking?), Susie, Larry, Lynn, Laura and Tommy (though there are plenty of Thomases.) Names like Devin, Aiden, Conrad, Kylie, Mackenzie, Jayden, Peyton, Nolan, Sterling, Trinity, Kaz, Carson, Sierra, Myka, Elijah, Marshall, Holland, Graham and Spencer are the norm these days. (Most of these I grabbed directly out of our elementary school's directory.) When I see a story with characters who have outdated names, I tend to think the writer is rather disconnected from children. Often the writer may be somewhat older and unaware of current naming trends. But there's an easy fix---you can go to any of the zillion baby naming sites and find out the most popular 100, or 1000, names of any given year. That way you'll choose names for your characters that sound fresh and modern and won't make you seem out of touch.