Share your spelling pet peeves

[ShadeOfAce]

Mixing up "Lose" and "Loose" is one of my bigger spelling pet peeves. I see it so often I sometimes want to throw a fit.

[Greybird]

Lynn Truss wrote a book called 'Eats shoots and leaves' a few years back. It was a best seller and explained punctuation and grammar excellently.

[WillDL]

Ads in social media by car mechanics or asking for a car mechanic.  "I do break jobs."  Me:  If you advertise that you break it, I don't think I want to use your service.

[nautybaby]

Like many others here my list of spelling and grammar peeves is too long to itemize here, or remember at one sitting for that matter.

One I find especially irksome is "taunt" instead of "taut". These are not even close to being interchangeable.

I understand I am being nerdy, but I had to respond to this:

But there's still a lot of subjectivity and always will be. For instance:

• Seems to me a lot of people...
• Seems to me, a lot of people...
• It seems to me, a lot of people

All three of those are correct. Some people will insist on the comma. Others will say the first two are not complete sentence because the subject is implied and not written.

The second two are correct; the first is not. "[It] seems to me" is a parenthetical remark, it should be set off by a comma or commas, depending on where it falls in the sentence. None of these is a complete sentence. the subject of the sentence is "people." "A lot of" is a prepositional phrase acting as an adjective, modifying people. There is no verb; therefore, the sentence is incomplete.

With that off my chest, I will say that although I find poor grammar and spelling distracting at best, I am willing to overlook it if the story is good or otherwise well written. Typos should always be forgiven. If misspellings and grammatical errors are consistent, gently pointing it out in a private message, with the aim of helping a writer improve, is better than calling them out in a public comment.