Ask Me a Question

If you have a writing, grammar, style or punctuation question, send an e-mail message to curiouscase at sign hotmail dot com.

Add Your Own Criminal Sentence!

If you find a particularly terrible sentence somewhere, post it for all to see (go here and put it in the Comments section).

Monday, August 2, 2010

Poll Results 97

Here was the question, which referred to the newspaper misspelling Dan Haren's name (Heron):

Can you excuse a newspaper for misspelling an athlete's name in a headline? (See associated post below.)

Yes
5 (10%)
No
45 (90%)

Well, you can imagine what my vote would be. I'd be interested to hear a valid excuse for the mistake!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

There's certainly no excuse, but it's probably easier to do than in any other form of journalism. There are a huge number of athletes in each particular sport, and many can have the same or similar names. However, that's all the more reason to perform multiple checks of the spelling of names--especially in headlines.

crafterly said...

No excuse. His name was spelled correctly in the article. How did they miss the error in the headline? Haste makes waste.

The Sentence Sleuth said...

There's no excuse. Except perhaps if the headline writer was up at 3 AM. I've never worked at a newspaper, but I think copy editors write headlines and have to work in the middle of the night to meet the printing deadline.