I remember when the AVP used to produce respectable "news" stories on their site. They were timely, a decent read, edited.

This year? Not so much. This article marks a new low: Branagh/Youngs pull off miracle. I don't claim to be a great news writer or anything, but damn, if this isn't some crap writing.

Typos, misspellings, terrible punctuation, 12 — count them, 12 — applications of the em dash, sentence fragments galore, and other insults to grammar that would make a 5th grader blush.

Fun with quotes:

"I," Youngs said, "told Nicole at 13-9, 'OK, let's make a miracle happen.'"

Really. That was the best way to write that quote? I comma Youngs said. Seriously? Seriously?

I don't even think this is a complete sentence:

Thing is, after May-Treanor's touch -- it actually deflected the ball backward where Walsh had no chance to reach it -- the ball hit a TV camera, leading the officials to call for a replay of the point.

Holy sh*t! Did you seriously just start a sentence with "Thing is ..."? That's a hard move, son.

Nevermind that the story is like a chronological nightmare. There's no continuity: you have to piece together what happened deductively. It's like someone puked on a page and you're tying to figure out what they had for dinner. (Yes, I'm proud of that metaphor.)

I don't blame the writer. Everyone has to start somewhere. In fact, the best writer I know personally keeps the red ink pen companies in business.

But is this an indicator of the AVP's further decline, in that they can't even afford an editor? Not even freelance?

Get Hans to do it. Seriously.