Grammar boo-boos and jargon-fighting tips

Our Ragan columnist can easily find grammar mistakes in even the most reputable newspapers. Can you?

Last month on Ragan.com, Don Ranly said he never had to make good on his promise to pay his writing seminar students $5 for each grammar or punctuation mistake they found in their national and city newspapers.

Several readers disagreed with Ranly. They asserted that they could find any number of typos, misspellings and grammatical mistakes in their daily newspapers.

I decided to test their assertions by looking at a couple of recent issues of The Wall Street Journal.

Here’s what I found: Although my search was by no means scientific or exhaustive (I read only a very few stories interesting to me for other reasons), I came up with two howlers almost immediately.