The post in which I admit my grammatical flaws

In “Do you make these mistakes when you write?” on Copyblogger (a site I mentioned in my last post) Brian Clark highlights seven common mistakes that the masters Strunk and White and some of Copyblogger’s readers have highlighted:

1. Loose vs. lose
2. Me, myself, and I
3. Different than vs. different from
4. Improper use of the apostrophe (I’ve delved into that subject a few times)
5. Parallelism
6. i.e. vs. e.g.
7. Could of, would of, should of

My main problems concern “lead” vs. “led” and “their” vs. “there.” While I know the differences between them, it requires conscious thought to make sure I get them right. Usually good grammar comes easier to me.

What writing mistakes are you prone to make?

A non-native English speaker’s thoughts about English

Prajwal Sharma, who wrote about “Cleaning up your writing by avoiding these six common mistakes” as a guest writer on this site,” has a couple of good articles about English from his days writing for The Truman State Index (free registration required):

• “Americans’ command over English falls dismally short“
• “Native speakers should try teaching English abroad“

Both of Prajwal’s pieces, however, are insightful and worth reading. I usually enjoy reading non-native English speakers’ thoughts on our language. (Although I love the irony of one column saying that American’s mastery of English is dismal, yet the other piece encourages English speakers to share their knowledge with people trying to learn their language.)

I’m not the only writer and editor who takes pictures in public restrooms

Bad grammar is bad grammar, be it in a medical book or a public bathroom.

As he mentioned on his blog Bad Language, Matthew Stibbe thought, “I’m sure they don’t actually want people to put toilet tissue and nothing else down the loo but I did feel like I was breaking the rules when I had a pee” upon seeing this sign above a toilet, er, loo in Starbucks:

I’m just glad, however, that I’m not the only writer and editor willing to take a picture in a public restroom for the sake of documenting bad grammar.

Real-time lessons in writing

Before writing a blog entry—or anything for that matter—verify that you haven’t already written about that same idea. I just wrote a detailed entry about em dashes, en dashes, and hyphens, only to discover that I had written a similar piece last September.

I’m giving my most difficult client to my future mother-in-law

The hardest person to edit is yourself. People often read text they wrote as it is in their head, not how it appears on the paper. To overcome that barrier, I’ve suggested having the computer read back your text to you. That trick helps, but it doesn’t catch every mistake.

That’s what a mother-in-law is for—or, in my case, a soon-to-be mother-in-law. My fiancée’s parents were in town last weekend. We had a lovely time perusing wedding-related facilities. At one point, however, Margaret’s mom pulled me aside and said, “I’ve been reading your website.” Ut-oh. “In one post you used a semicolon where you should have used a comma.”

Now, in the long history of conversations between guys with websites and their future mothers-in-law, this exchange was an innocuous one. Nevertheless I was bothered because (to paraphrase Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby) everyone suspects himself of having mastered at least one piece of punctuation, and this is mine: I am one of the few people I have ever known that know how to use a semicolon. (And, yes, it should say “who know,” not “that know.” The mistake is Fitzgerald’s, not mine.)

Later on, when we were back at our apartment, my soon-to-be mother-in-law and I reviewed several entries on this site but, alas, could not find the incorrect semicolon. So now I have a mother-in-law who probably questions both my punctuatory prowess and ability to provide for her daughter and a website that has an erroneous semicolon.