A U.S. woman has successfully appealed a parking ticket because of a missing comma in the local law. Andrea Cammelleri from Middleton, Ohio was originally issued the ticket when she parked in the village of West Jefferson, Ohio in 2014.
According to the village’s law, certain vehicles cannot be parked for over 24 hours. One of the items in the list is a “motor vehicle camper”, which is missing a comma before the word “camper”. Cammelleri argued that the ticket was invalid because her pick-up truck could not be classified as a “motor vehicle camper”. This argument was accepted by Judge Robert Hendrickson of the 12th Ohio District Court of Appeals, who also urged the village to correct the grammatical error in its law.
Photos of the ticket have since spread over social media as a demonstration of how a simple missing comma can radically affect the meaning of a piece of text.
Small errors like missing or unnecessary commas are common, yet they can change the meaning and clarity of a sentence. While errors on a website news feed do not generally result in court cases, they do make it harder for visitors to appreciate the content. A poor visitor experience then usually leads to lower search rankings.
This is why it’s important that all your news feed content should be checked by editors. If you lack the resources for this, using a news writing service can ensure error-free content while also freeing you from writing your own material.
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