Punctuation Crimes at Y!CN
After carefully constructing captions, credits, and catchy titles for my slideshows, Yahoo publishing technology garbles them up. Special punctuation appears beyond the capability of our beloved publisher to publish them correctly.
Apostrophe
I don't dare put in an apostrophe (oh, there I just did) to show a contraction, lest it come out looking like Swahelian dialect.
I got something like this for the simple sentence, it's surreal: it#$%39;s surreal. Yes, it is indeed surreal!
Quotes
Quotation marks appear as a garbled mix of special characters and the word quote (misspelled as quot) where the quotation marks should be, before and after the phrase being quoted. Talk about obfuscating the meaning of the phrase! Don't even try to describe something as being off-meaning or cute in quotes.
I got something similar to this by putting the phrase jewelry engineering in quotes: *%$3q;jewelry engineering*%$3quot. It was anybody's guess as to what I was referring!
Ingan abstracts
Y!CN Contributor, Inga, wrote an article entitled Essay Topics College Applicants Would Actually Want to Write About describing real candidates as '…"real'&$&@ candidates in the descriptive summary. Yahoo took it upon itself to describe Inga's candidates in code!
Besides not knowing what to expect from Inga's article, my comment--typed in repetitively--has not been posted to date. Inga thought I was mad at her for saying nothing about it. Inga, my comment is emblazoned in my brain, having written it so many times but not published on your piece! There was a confounding quote in the comment, obviously. They chose not to publish it at all, despite my herculean Girl Scout effort to put it in.
Which brings me to my own "getting mad" at Yahoo (there I go, risking quotes in the text again) for these niggling errors in the publisher. Is anybody but me getting annoyed with the benign technical neglect of us Contributors?
Say what?
If you had a hard time reading this article, you are not alone. Say you have seen how Yahoo is massacring our writing. Say you understand what I'm writing when you really don't. Commiserate with me. And watch out that we don't purposely use correctly spelled four-letter words in our articles, hoping they come out disguised as $%X# in the published text.
Published by Lorraine Yapps Cohen
I design jewelry free from the constraints of textbook techniques and write non-fiction free from the rigors of technical expression. Chemist by training, creative by spirit, conservative in values, and art... View profile
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19 Comments
Post a CommentMy apologies if I mislead anyone re my innovative punctuation process. It was meant as a joke. I'm a fraud! Mea culpa! No, mea maxima culpa! Just when I thought Lorraine would become a fan of mine, I've destroyed her belief in me. A rotten start on the first day of the New Year!
Wow, what an out-of-the-box idea, Robert, intentionally garbling our writing! Writing wrong has never been advice for writing right, but I absolutely love the determined Boy Scout try to get out one's best (despite obvious obstacles in the way)!
Hi Lorraine!
Do what I do: if quotes or apostrophes are needed, I intentionally garble that word. The Yahoo mis-translator sets it right!
I just submitted a creative writing assignment in the Sci-Fi genre. It looked good (format-wise) in the preview. I'm keeping my arthritic fingers and toes crossed, though, for the final format.
Happy New Year!
Bob
Writing about classical music and other artsy topics, I often need to use diacritics - accent marks, tildes, etc. They used to show up fine in the body of the text, but now, the accent mark does not disappear; the whole letter AND accent mark do. So, my article about Salvador Dali (with accent over the i) now is about Salvador Dal. Guess how many people are searching for Salvador Dal?
well written - thank you
well written - thank you
Nice work!
Better I stick to my plain writing style. Maybe, I have missed some bugs in my articles! siva
I don't know why these weird characters show up when we try to use quotes or apostrophes!!! This happens to me too! It does not happen all the time though! Lately I am having problems with the links that I put in (hopefully correctly) actually working! Thanks for making me laugh!! Love your sense of humor!!
Great article and so painfully true...