Saturday, June 13, 2009

Overlooking the Obvious: Real-Life Examples of Bad Writing, No. 1

The lead sentence of a recent CBS-news headline read as follows: "For the second day in a row a newborn girl has been born on New York City's mass transit system."

It contains three writing errors (a rather impressive achievement when you realize that the sentence contains only twenty words).

First, there should be a comma after "row," as a comma usually follows a series of introductory prepositional phrases.

Second, there should be a hyphen between "mass" and "transit," as a hyphen usually joins one or more words used to form one adjective.

Third, the word "newborn" is superfluous. What other kind of girl who has just been born is there?

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