Happy Tuesday! Well, by the time most of you read this, it’ll be Wednesday or later because it’s evening here in California. I have a good excuse: I had braces applied today and I had a doctor appointment, on top of the usual work and activities.
Because of that, today’s entry will be short and simple. In fact, I came across these typos while reading a short news article during my daughter’s nap. This article is about a 500 kg woman named Eman Ahmed who was flown to India for weight loss surgery. Here’s a link to the original article.
I noticed several typos while casually and groggily reading (I usually nap with the toddler if I can), and looking at the article again while searching for the link, I see more that I missed the first time! Well, I’ll just point out the ones I see in the two screenshots I took with my phone.
Take a look:
Right off the bat, the period in “Dr.” is missing. Then there’s a minor style issue: it looks funny to start a paragraph with “He, in fact, said.” Why not just say “He said, in fact,” or “In fact, he said” — either of those looks better to me, but that’s my opinion.
Then, I’m pretty certain that “90 minute surgery” should be “90-minute surgery” since the first two words are combined to make one adjective. In fact, my spell checker is underlining the first version as possibly incorrect. These computer programs aren’t always right, but I think mine is right in this case.
One thing I know is incorrect is the extra space inserted into the word “doctor.”
As for the rest of the screenshot, that continues in the following one below. Let’s take a look!
The website where this article appears is The Times of India, which I would suppose uses British writing conventions. In that case, the first word after a colon — “the” — should not be capitalized, according to this source. Personally, I don’t like the appearance of capitalized words after a colon at all (except for proper nouns or acronyms), so I guess I side with The Chicago Manual of Style on that one.
Both APA and Chicago agree that the first word in a list following a colon shouldn’t be capitalized, so according to Grammarly, it’s wrong to do so no matter what in this case. In addition, the semicolons separating the list items should just be split into sentences or changed to commas — probably a combination of both. Semicolons are not used for listing things; they’re used for connecting two closely related sentences, such as what you’re reading right now!
In addition, there’s no mention of Eman having problems with only one of her lungs, so it’s pretty certain that “lung’s” should be simply “lungs.”
In the second paragraph, there are simple spacing typos: a missing space before “A” and an extra space before “hepatopathy.”
What’s probably going on here is that the writer may not be a native English speaker. In addition, they probably wrote the article as quickly as possible and it looks like they didn’t even give it a cursory glance after writing. It happens. Even so, just one review would have fixed most if not all of these mistakes.