Los Angeles Times | Associated Press | The Washington Post
The August 7th story in the Los Angeles Times was about Pigeon-eating Neanderthals, but the hyphen was apparently left out. L.A .Times’ Henry Fuhrmann, assistant managing editor, copy desks and standards, tweeted about the missing hyphen.
From our occasional series "Add a hyphen, save a life," with credit to @LATsciguy for spotting the omission: http://t.co/XuKv1REMUx
— Henry Fuhrmann (@hfuhrmann) August 13, 2014
In grammatically-unrelated but bird-related news, the Associated Press and The Washington Post wrote about a chicken that tried to cross the road and prompted a call to police. Here’s the AP’s story from Portland, Oregon:
He assured the dispatcher he was not joking.
The dispatcher chuckled – and asked a clarifying question.
“It’s just the one chicken?”
The caller said yes.
And from The Washington Post, Sarah Larimer included a public service announcement from Portland Police.
According to a news release from the Portland Police Bureau (partial headline: “Officers Unable to Determine Chicken’s Intent”), “responding officers were unable to locate the chicken and fortunately there were no traffic crashes related to this unusual report.”
Related: Poynter’s News University has a lot of courses on grammar and punctuation, including:
— Language Primer: Basics of Grammar, Punctuation and Word Use, a self-directed course
— 7 Tools for Next-Level Writing: National Grammar Day 2014, a Webinar
— And National Punctuation Day: Tools, Not Rules, for Writing and Reading, also a Webinar
I did check News University for any guidance on covering birds and bird-related incidents and found nothing. (Correction: I was wrong! I’m told there’s bird-related content here.)
Comments