I always hesitate to post about poor proofreading because I know my own blog posts are probably riddled with errors. But I am not a professional journalist, nor do I play one on TV. And, according to Grammar Bitch, I can blame my old age for those errors.

I am, however, a lifelong member of the English major’s club who has grown increasingly frustrated with the utter lack of concern for proofreading—especially in an age when AI is readily available to check spelling and grammar for you. This isn’t about style or substance or rhetoric; these are silly punctuation, spelling and missed words that a simple read aloud would have picked up.

I generally just roll my eyes and move on, but today I was annoyed because the writer was so busy being snarky about Selena Gomez (I’m a fan!) that she, a professional journalist, overlooked her own misses:

We can all be honest about the fact that Selena Gomez has had some catastrophic red carpet misses over the years. But her style has drastically improved in recent months–and she looked incredibly (sic) tonight in this off-the-shoulder Prada gown.

I ran the quote through ChatGPT, which suggested the following revisions, including hyphenating “red carpet” when used as an adjective:

We can all agree that Selena Gomez has had some catastrophic red-carpet misses over the years. However, her style has drastically improved in recent months—and she looked incredible tonight in this off-the-shoulder Prada gown.

The bot adopts a more professional tone and streamlines the prose. While it may not align with the writer’s intended style, at least it gets the words right. To her credit, she did hyphenate “off-the-shoulder” correctly, but—not to be too snarky myself—it was probably written that way in the press release.

I suspect part of the issue is that proofreaders no longer exist so there is no second reader. Many decades ago, when I worked in public relations, my boss, a founding member of the grammar police, required extensive proofreading prior to printed publication. We read it alone, together, forwards and backwards. Every so often, an error crept in. It happens to the best of us. But errors were very rare in the four years I worked there, probably because we knew we would find ourselves on our own sort of red carpet when it was discovered. Today, it seems errors abound from headlines to first paragraphs to captions. Maybe we just have bigger things to worry about?

I promise this blog is not going to become an extension of the grammar police state but if you come for Selena, you better get it right. Plus, she did look incredible.