It’s that darn apostrophe |
My high school English teacher loved the red pen. Especially when I misused apostrophes. Guilty as charged. http://www.its-not-its.info/ might be handy for fellow writing geeks who need a friendly apostrophe primer reminder.
As a reader past participles are one of my pet peeves. I’ve seen words like ‘took’ often misused. Had, have, has ‘took’ is wrong. Had, have, has taken is correct.
What’s your reader pet peeve? Something I keep doing here (hopefully not)? My English teacher’s ears are ringing. This post is for you, Mr. G.
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My biggest pet peeve: lose/loose.
If I read the misuse of ‘lose’ as ‘loose’ on a blog, my competence in the writer deteriorates greatly.
Same goes for their/there/they’re, your/you’re and too/to.
Comment by Nick Burns — October 13, 2008 @ 12:53 pm PST
That’s a good one, Nick, thanks.
Comment by TDavid — October 13, 2008 @ 12:55 pm PST
Yup yup, when you’ve got one of those squiggly li’l rascals in your name, you do tend to key in its misuses and abuses pretty readily. Like Nick, I’m really chapped when supposedly “pro” bloggers consistently get easy words like “they’re” and “their” confused. It’s enough to give ya apostrophobia!
Comment by Rob O. — October 14, 2008 @ 12:25 am PST
Ahhh yes, the dreaded ‘they’re’, ‘their’ and ‘there’ issue, Rob. That one should be an easy one though, shouldn’t it? they’re = they are — that only fits certain sentences and ‘there’ is talking about a location, not a group of people … over there, over there.
BTW, Rob, it seems the link to Gerald’s site in your linked post is dead. As a reader that sucks too. Just so I’m not being hypocritical, I know there are dead links to sites here (plenty of them). Most bloggers have them and as the post gets older the number of those links goes down.
Got to be a good way to deal with this problem. Maybe Waybackmachine, Google cache, etc so readers can get the context. I remember having to edit 18 posts due to linkrot. In the comments Peter suggests a 7-year plan for widescale linkrot maintenance. Seems like a good idea. I’d imagine linkrot after 7 years for most blogs is significant.
Comment by TDavid — October 14, 2008 @ 7:19 am PST
Ooof! Fixed that dead link. Thanks for the heads up, TD!
Comment by Rob O. — October 14, 2008 @ 12:17 pm PST