Barbara Wallraff, a contributing editor and columnist for The Atlantic, has worked for the magazine for 25 years. She is also a weekly syndicated newspaper columnist for King Features and the author of Word Fugitives (2006), Your Own Words (2004), and the national best-seller Word Court (2000). Her writing about language has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wilson Quarterly, The American Scholar, and The New York Times Magazine. 
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No, it's not a "visitor's" center!
ByMy extremely cool colleague Jim Fallows has written about the dopey mistakes the Chinese make when they translate things into English -- most recently here. He wonders why they don't ask a native English speaker to look translations over before making them public.
I, however, worry about the dopey mistakes that native English speakers make. I wonder why people don't run things by someone who's known to be good with spelling and punctuation and so forth.
Here's a case in point. That's Harvard in the background. (Apologies if the photo looks as peculiar on your screen as it does on mine!) I'm beginning to think the battle against misplaced apostrophes is over, and my side lost.
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