A long sentence for a long absence

For our at-work Halloween celebration, I dressed up as a run-on sentence. It was a total of 191 words long (which, if you're curious, equaled eight yards of ribbon), with many independent clauses.

Wanna bet the t-shirt writer went to U of Michigan?

It's been a long stretch without a post...but I can't resist sharing this article (FYI, Michigan is Ohio State's big football rival, so the title of my post is for all the Buckeye fans out there):
http://shine.yahoo.com/event/fallfashion/grammar-fail-on-old-navys-college-t-shirts-uh-oh-2531551/

On a side note, considering her choice of subject, I am going to choose to believe that the author is either British or chooses to write in the British style--because if not, she has a grammar fail in her article, too. Can you spot it?

"Hundreds of thousands of shirts...have been shipped to stores with the phrase 'Let's Go', sans apostrophe."

In which spellcheck (almost) redeems itself

I'm a believer in first going after the low-hanging fruit, so when I started a recent document editing project, I didn't hesitate to make a first pass using Word's Spelling & Grammar function.

My directive was simply to proof the document and make minor edits to copy based on changes provided by the client, so I clicked "ignore" on the plentiful suggestions to address usage of passive voice. I accepted changes to spelling errors and spacing issues, and studied the context for any identified sentence fragments or other infractions before choosing to ignore most (the majority were items in bulleted lists).

But I nearly chortled in joy when Word suggested that I reconsider the use of the word "impact" as a verb--this is one of my top three copywriting pet peeves, but I've never seen it flagged by Word as an error.

And I really DID chortle when, a few pages later, it suggested that I replace the phrase "step-by-step" with the word "systematic."

And then Word reminded me why I get paid the big bucks: it completely missed that "acronym" was misspelled "acroynm."

Three cheers for another victory of (wo)man over machine!

I like this video...less because of the message than because I think the guy in it is a cutie.

Again, not "that" Written Expressions...

I got an interesting email today:

"Hey Amie,

How's it going? Good I hope. I wanted to send over an email to you because I'm interested in sending over a few shots from a recent shoot I did for a romance & fiction book cover.

I have about 15-20 photos from the shoot that have never been published and are very high quality. These photos are good for any book cover (except gay publications.)

I am not looking to make any money off these, all I ask is that I get credit as the model in the book and that I get notified of a publication.

I have photos ready to go, just send me an email and I'll forward them to you.

Hope this email finds everything well with you."

I contemplated two responses (you'll be happy--or maybe disappointed--to know I went with the former):

1. Telling him the truth, which is that I am not the Written Expressions that publishes erotic novels
2. Telling him I only write gay literature and suggesting he send some "less vanilla" photos for my use
   

This is the second time I've been confused with the other Written Expressions...I don't think I can legally send a "cease and desist" to the other, but I don't like the thought that a person looking for me could accidentally end up on their site instead of mine, and not realize they're in the wrong place. So what's a poor writer/editor (of something other than erotic fiction) to do?