Thoroughness Challenge

The Thoroughness Challenge is a post consisting of paragraphs that contain spelling and/or grammatical errors. The paragraphs with the errors corrected and highlighted in red can be found at the end of the post.

Note: The purpose of the Challenge is thoroughness. You're only looking for errors in spelling and/or grammar. Names and places will NOT be misspelled, nor will there by any changes to punctuation or sentence structure.


Your Challenge today is about the early days of search engine optimization and contains 37 errors.

Good Luck!
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Webmasters and content providers began optimzing sites for search engines in the mid 1990s. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the varous engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return infomation found on the page to be indexed. The prosess involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second progam, known as an indexer, extracts varous information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specfic words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a schedular for crawling at a latter date.

Site owners started to recogize the value of having there sites highly ranked and visable in search engine results, and the phrase "search engine optimazation" probably came into use in 1997.

Early versions of search algorithyms relied on webmaster-provided infomation such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentally be an innacurate representaton of the site's actual content. Inacurate, inconplete, and inconsistant data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelavant searches. Web content providers also maniplated a number of atributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusivley within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking maniplation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adept to ensure their results pages showed the most relavant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numrous keywords by unscrupulus webmasters. Since the sucess and popularity of a search engine is determned by its ability to produce the most relavant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by develping more complex ranking algorythms, taking into account addtional factors that were more diffcult for webmasters to munipulate.

Now, let's see how thorough you are!

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Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid 1990s. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, and the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches. Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density, which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.





Wishing all you Cool Cats a totally Cool and HAPPY day!

Writing Numbers as Words

Many readers have asked me why people write numbers this way: Example: We will need 220 (two hundred twenty) chairs. Isn’t it unnecessary to have both numerals and words for the same number? Rule of Thumb: There are two reasons for using both: 1. You are more likely to make an error when typing a numeral than when typing a word AND much less likely to spot the error when proofreading. 2. If your document is dense, has a lot of numbers, or contains large numbers, the numerical form helps your readers scan information quickly. So by typing a combination of a numeral and a word, you are almost guaranteed accuracy and ease of reading. Rule: Some authorities say that the numbers one through nine or ten should be spelled out and figures used for higher numbers. Other authorities spell out one through one hundred, plus even hundreds, thousands, and so on. The best strategy is to be consistent. Correct Examples: I want five copies, not ten copies. I want 5 copies, not 10 copies. Rule: Be consistent within a category. For example, if you choose numerals because one of the numbers you must deal with is greater than ten, you should use numerals for everything in that category. If you use numbers in different categories, use figures for one category and words for the other. Correct Example: Given the budget constraints, if all 30 history students attend the four plays, then the 7 math students will be able to attend only two plays. (Students are represented with figures; plays are represented with words.) Incorrect Example: I asked for five pencils, not 50.

Source: Grammarbook

Obituary — The English Language

By Gene Weingarten,
Pulitzer-prize-winning author


The English language, which arose from humble Anglo-Saxon roots to become the lingua franca of 600 million people worldwide and the dominant lexicon of international discourse, is dead. It succumbed last month at the age of 1,617 after a long illness. It is survived by an ignominiously diminished form of itself.

The end came quietly on Aug. 21 on the letters page of The Washington Post. A reader castigated the newspaper for having written that Sasha Obama was the "youngest" daughter of the president and first lady, rather than their "younger" daughter. In so doing, however, the letter writer called the first couple the "Obama's." This, too, was published, constituting an illiterate proofreading of an illiterate criticism of an illiteracy. Moments later, already severely weakened, English died of shame.

The language's demise took few by surprise. Signs of its failing health had been evident for some time on the pages of America's daily newspapers, the flexible yet linguistically authoritative forums through which the day-to-day state of the language has traditionally been measured. Beset by the need to cut costs, and influenced by decreased public attention to grammar, punctuation and syntax in an era of unedited blogs and abbreviated instant communication, newspaper publishers have been cutting back on the use of copy editing, sometimes eliminating it entirely.

In the past year alone, as the language lay imperiled, the ironically clueless misspelling "pronounciation" has been seen in the Boston Globe, the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Deseret Morning News, Washington Jewish Week and the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times, where it appeared in a correction that apologized for a previous mispronunciation.

On Aug. 6, the very first word of an article in the Winston-Salem (N.C.) Journal was "Alot," which the newspaper employed to estimate the number of Winston-Salemites who would be vacationing that month.

The Lewiston (Maine) Sun-Journal has written of "spading and neutering." The Miami Herald reported on someone who "eeks out a living" -- alas, not by running an amusement-park haunted house. The Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star described professional football as a "doggy dog world." The Vallejo (Calif.) Times-Herald and the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune were the two most recent papers, out of dozens, to report on the treatment of "prostrate cancer."

Observers say, however, that no development contributed more dramatically to the death of the language than the sudden and startling ubiquity of the vomitous verbal construction "reach out to" as a synonym for "call on the phone," or "attempt to contact." A jargony phrase bloated with bogus compassion -- once the province only of 12-step programs and sensitivity training seminars -- "reach out to" is now commonplace in newspapers. In the last half-year, the New York Times alone has used it more than 20 times in a number of contextually indefensible ways, including to report that the Blagojevich jury had asked the judge a question.

It was not immediately clear to what degree the English language will be mourned, or if it will be mourned at all. In the United States, English has become increasingly irrelevant, particularly among young adults. Once the most popular major at the nation's leading colleges and universities, it now often trails more pragmatic disciplines, such as economics, politics, government, and, ironically, "communications," which increasingly involves learning to write mobile-device-friendly ads for products like Cheez Doodles.

Many people interviewed for this obituary appeared unmoved by the news, including Anthony Incognito of Crystal City, a typical man in the street.

"Between you and I," he said, "I could care less."




Source: Grammarbook

Virgule

The virgule (/), is known by many names, including diagonal, solidus, oblique, slant, slash, forward slash, and slash mark. The virgule is used to represent a word that is not written out or to separate or set off certain adjacent elements of text.

A virgule most commonly signifies alternatives. In certain contexts it represents the word or.

Examples:

he/she
his/her
oral/written tests
and/or
alumni/ae

A virgule represents the word per or to when used with units of measure or when used to indicate the terms of a ratio.

Examples:

40,000 tons/year
14 gm/100 cc
9 ft./sec.
a 50/50 split

A virgule replaces the word and in some compound terms.

Examples:

in the May/June issue
1973/74
parent/child problems

A virgule punctuates some abbreviations and in lieu of a period.

Examples:

c/o
w/
w/o
S/Sgt
d/b/a




Source: Grammar Done Right!