Not Washed or Cooked, # 49

Here’s an old friend:

Link: The Surrealists, ‘Recieves grace [sic] by Yves Tanguy’

So recieves appears for receives, while the punctuation needs work: a comma is needed before by. 

There’s another issue here which we’ll come back to sometime soon: when did titles stop being presented as titles and start being treated as plain phrases or sentences? (The missing comma above accentuates the issue in this case.) You don’t expect to see book conventions (generally titles italicized for long/big works, or placed in quotation marks for smaller ones) followed everywhere, but titles used to have capital letters on the key words (mainly, but not exclusively, nouns and verbs) — that’s how you know they are titles and which words are in the title. The practice seems to be dying out, even including in some books and academic publications; and (unsurprisingly) the result is that it is frequently difficult to distinguish titles from surrounding text…

Not Washed or Cooked, # 19

We addressed the order of e and i in December, but here it is again, and not for the last time.

Today's example, provided by Dr Faustus, offers a discount off a text that we can only hope was spell-checked and proofread before it was published by this 'independent media company and nexus of travel culture worldwide', now moving into book publication:

 Link: Matador, No Foreign Lands

Oddly, the page now has a popup repeating the promotion information, but this time correctly spelt:

There's quite a lot of material in the How to Write sections on the site; this covers travel writing, dealing with editors, finding a voice, and other useful issues, but I could find nothing on using a spell-checker or proofreading. Maybe you only get that if you enroll on the 'travel writing course from MatadorU'. (That's 'U' as in University.)