And all forms of apostrophe errors and omissions.

A great book: “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” by Lynne Truss.

Long paragraphs make me want to quickly hit the back button and find someone who knows how to write articles that are easy to read.

Whew - I need a nap!

Your and you’re is another common mistake. Unfortuantely, a program like MSWord does not always catch these errors, nor does it catch my fast fingers that sometimes skip a word or transpose letters.

My solution? I have my daughter proof all of my articles…most of my articles. Any that you find with typos, she did not see.

We do not always catch our own errors. Have others proof your work before you submit it.

My 2 cents,

Audrey :)

As for Lance, Mr. can’t proof cuz he’s busy writing articles, we’ll forgive you.

And me… Well, Thanks Chris (and editors) for catching all my scary mistakes and fixing them.

I usually have someone proof my articles, or at least slow down long enough to read through them myself before I post, but my objective is to get them posted, so there are those moments when i don’t get it done.

Information is great, usually I spell well.

Audrey, I love your solution.

Jan

My worst is the old ‘i before e except after c’ issue, which isn’t quite accurate, so I stumble along and depend on spellchackers for that.

My second is the ubiquitous from/form problem, which the spellchecker won’t sort out for me.

I have one solution that I can share with you. A success in this complex world of getting the grammar right.

Its the ‘it’s’ and ‘its’ situation. A freebie book came through my letterbox last week, with the Saturday newspaper. In this ‘Oxford Grammar’ book, I was reminded that when serving a ‘belonging’ state, the normal rules get suspended and it’s, becomes its.

Whereas the foreshortening of the two words ‘it is’, becomes the one you can do an apostrophe on.

Notwithstanding this, I got the rule the wrong way round for the first week and then realised that if I remembered that ‘it is’ has a little dot above the second ‘i’, that could amazingly transform into an apostrophe, I would never forget that again.

Phew!

I will pivot on the topic just a skoche and say that “LOL” is my pet peeve.

Hopefully, no one is LOLing in their articles. But when people write me “professional” emails that include lots of LOLs… I do tend to worry about such individuals a bit. Particularly if we’ve never met, nor is anything in their email especially humorous.

Something like this: “Hi Chris, great job with this topic, LOL… I never make mistakes, yeah right, LOL!!!!”

I get to picturing them holed up somewhere with the laptop, typing sentences and laughing at themselves for no apparent reason…

(Multiple exclams also get my goat.)

I’ve had someone explain to me how
unprofessional a help desk person was because he kept signing his emails with Lots Of Love, which she thought was a bit offensive for someone she didn’t know well. Needless to say she was a lot happier once I told her what it really stood for!

And she certainly isn’t alone in making this erroneous connection.

“LOL”

Example, LOL can mean:

Lots of Love,
Lots Of Luck,
Laughing Out Loud,
Lots Of Laughs,
Lots of Laughter,
Lack Of Life, etc…
http://emoticonuniverse.com/slang/

Why this word gives such a huge amount of people so much trouble is beyond me. I guess it’s just one of those words.

Spellings are varied: definately, defanitly, definitly, definatly… and any other ‘guesses’ because they can’t figure it out.

Solutions to spelling and grammar errors are to just take the time and check. Review your work before posting - not once but 3 times if necessary. I probably review mine 5 times, every time I re-read and make a change.

Turn on the spell check and grammar check feature in Word. When you find an error, log it as an ‘auto correct’ so next time it just fixes it automatically. Look up any word that gives you trouble - that you’re in any way unsure about.

I can’t believe I read here that someone is in too big a hurry to post their articles to bother reviewing them. Makes one wonder.

Sylvia

My pet peeve is keyword overstuffing. Writing for search engines won’t help you much if you annoy your human readers into clicking the back button within the first paragraph–search engines don’t have credit cards.

“Dear Reader, I could care less about you, I just want to sucker people like you into my website to make money. I win, you lose sucker”

I wish people would stop abusing things. I am glad that most authors here are much better than that.

Quotations/Punctuation are similar to commas. They are not necessarily always used for the same purposes, and grammar rules don’t always apply.

For instance: You can use either a comma or a colon after the “For instance” at the beginning of this sentence. Either is appropriate.

Grammar often becomes a complaint or pet peeve, when it doesn’t agree with a local dialect. The other difference I see frequently, is meaning of words. Whenever I see words used differently than I prefer to use them, I read the surrounding sentences to see if there’s a variation in meaning that I missed. Usually, there’s a difference.

Hey Lance, I like Industry Slang; it gives me something to stumble over besides my bi-focals.

Jan

People write “loose” or “looser” when they mean “lose” or “loser”.

(I’ll refrain from the obvious repartee we could have with this particular set of words!)

When did it become so difficult to tell the difference between “loose” and “lose”? They’re not even pronounced the same!

Don’t get me started on these kinds of problems. It doesn’t take much for me to loose my cool!

Kevin

Jan

I’ve noticed that in some newsletters I get. It always made me laugh - until I realized sometimes I’ve mistakenly inserted an extra letter in a word because my keyboard gets stuck sometimes when I’m punching away at it (suppose I should be a bit more gentle…)

That will teach me for relying on spell checker though. I actually try and write in US english, and use a US spellchecker for my articles, though I am Australian. So, I can only wonder at the mix of (correct) spelling and incorrect grammer that produces :-)

Ah well, one of the hazhards of the global internet.

Rebecca

Now I need to depart,
Jan