My editing pet peeve - what's yours?

And who would he strike out besides batters?

 

Calculating anniversaries wrong drives me nuts. AP had a story this weekend revolving around the 50th anniversary of what is now the Coca-Cola 600. Except the race was first run in 1960 (which was included in the story), making this the 50th running but the 49th anniversary.

 

My pet peeve? Writers who don't realize that in many instances, it is better to paraphrase than use a wordy, incoherent direct quote.

As one of my former editors once put it, "We ain't stenographers." A lot of times, we can say it better than Coach Jockitch the glorified P.E. teacher can.

I'll put it another way. If you've got a quote that is longer than three sentences, 99.9 percent of time, some or all of that quote should have been paraphrased.

 

That's just homophobia.

The two words mean the same in nearly any sports context. I've had it changed when you write "he walked Smith on four straight curveballs," simply because curveballs by their nature aren't really straight ... I have issues with using "in a row" when it's less than three, just because it isn't much of a row at two ...

 

The production staff who don't format text properly for the Web. Headlines and cutlines are in caps until I fix it. Stories are tagged with nonsensical tags.