Share Your Grammar Pet Peeve With My Readers

Okay, I have this copywriting thing. I feel like, when I talk to my readers about marketing plans and strategies, I'm swimming with the Big Sharks. (Ask Lori Davis about Sharks). Plans and strategies are synonymous with profit.

And yet, if you're writing marketing copy, it's still important to dwell in minutiae, i.e. be mindful of all the little things. Like grammar and punctuation.

I plan to feature a Grammatical Pet Peeves article in the next issue of Word Food: the Copywriting and Marketing Ezine. If this intrigues you, sign up now!

Mind you, my intention is not to whine and complain. It's to point out that good ol' fashioned grammar is still a critical piece of your professional image. I want to deliver concrete examples that my readers can make a mental note of and save "for next time" they're writing copy.

When I was still corporate, I worked alongside a lovely young woman who seemed to think that "supposably" was a word. She was, ahem (coughing) a copywriter. She wrote this word, "supposably," in her emails all the time.

So how does this happen? Beats me, but I'd love to get your input on this upcoming grammar feature. What's your grammar gripe or punctuation peeve? Send your stories... respond right in the COMMENTS section of this post.

If they're relevant, I'll share your remarks and your website URL with my newsletter audience!

Thanks.

Dina at Wordfeeder.com Copywriting and Marketing

Comments

[Lori, DavisVA.com]

Dina,

You are a Big Shark, baby!

I've got a few peeves:

1. Overabundance of exclamation points. Good lawdy, this makes me want to throw the laptop at the wall. I understand the need to show excitement about your products, services, etc. I get it(!) and one bang (exclamation point) will suffice.

When I see this:

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Well, I go over the deep end. When I see too many bangs, I trash the e-mail or move away from the website or blog.

2. It's and Its. This is an easy one to fix--read the sentence out loud and break up it's to it is.

"It's my party and I'll cry if I want to." (It is my party ... makes sense.)

"The cat belongs to it's owner." (The cat belongs to it is owner? Nope, doesn't work. Use its, instead.)

3. Us and We. Remove the word immediately after either of these words as you're reading the sentence out loud.

"We girls like to party all night long." (We like to party all night long. Makes sense.)

"Us boys are taking a trip to New York City." (Us are taking a trip ... that doesn't work.)

Irregardless is another one. Stop that!

Nuclear not Nuc-u-ler. Makes me crazy!

Love this idea, Dina, and I can't wait to see how others respond.

Lori

[Deepak Morris]

"Mouth to Mouth Publicity" seems to be the result of an idiom massacred, particularly in the Indian subcontinent (mainly India and Pakistan and spread to the Middle East because we have such a heavy presence there).

I suspect it is a meld of "Word of mouth publicity" and "Mouth to mouth resuscitation."

What the speaker/writer MEANS is, "Word of mouth publicity". What is generally SAID/WRITTEN is, "Mouth to mouth publicity".

That drives me batty because I get visions of having to apply my mouth to those of heavy, sweaty, hung-over men in order to broadcast my message.

Then there's the "loose vs. lose" confusion.

I often see stickers and posters offering ways to help me loose weight.

Um, no thanks, is my reaction, I'd rather not have my weight running around loose.

The English do not make this mistake because the two words are pronounced differently there.

Loose is pronounced "luce" and refers to something that is unanchored.

Lose is pronounced the way it is in the US (looze) and refers to the act of ridding oneself (purposefully or not) of something.

BTW, I was toying with the idea of starting a weekly newsletter that would offer practical ways to tackle grammar but the need to make a living got in the way.

Maybe I'll just post my tips here.

Deepak

[EzineArticles Guy]

Dina,

I think the one that drives me a little crazy is the lack of a space after a period or any punctuation mark.

In English, there is always a space after the period or full stop. :-)

[Stephanie M. Cockerl]

Hi Dina,
My main pet peeve has to be when someone writes their listing all caps for everything. I see it everywhere. Classified sites, dating sites and gasp... even job listings. I know there is a time and place for emphasis as Lori said, but having all caps is overkill. It makes me want to run away instead of learn more.

[Meri Raffetto]

Hi Dina-

I am with Deepak on the "lose and loose" situation. In the weight loss industry I see people put "loose weight" all the time.

[David B. Bohl]

Great topic!

Far and away, it has to be verb tense.

I think it started out many years ago in the world of sports. I guess the writers wanted to sensationalize things and/or make everything that was happening seem instantaneous. For example: "Peyton Manning again makes it to the Super Bowl." No! He again made it to the Super Bowl. Or he will again make it to the Super Bowl.

It's crept into everything we read. Yesterday, I read something like this: "The U.S. Supreme Court today upholds a ban on a specific abortion procedure." No! They upheld a ban.

I could cite numerous examples.

When my kids were much younger (they're both now in college), my wife and I spent countless hours trying to help them with this very issue.

Unfortunately, the situation continues to worsten as we're bombarded on all fronts with these abuses of our verbs.

David

[Marie Rippel - All About Spelling]

Hi Dina,

Here are some common errors that jumped out at me this week:

CORRECT: easy-to-assemble bike
WRONG: this bike is easy-to-assemble

CORRECT: She is a copywriter.
WRONG: She is a copyrighter.

In addition, I would be very interested in hearing your solutions to these two snags I run into in my own writing:

#1. I'm looking for smooth ways to avoid saying he/she, his/her. Sample sentence: "Each student should have his own set of flashcards."

It was drilled into me in English class that you don't write, "Each student should have their own set of flashcards." We actually had worksheets in grade school where we reworded sentences to avoid such situations, and ended up with passive sentences like, "A set of flashcards should be given to each student." Yuck.

I am tempted to use "their" instead of "him." I wouldn't be sweating this, except that my audience consists of English teachers!

#2. I know that you should avoid ending a sentence with a preposition, but sometimes the resulting sentence is stilted. Any suggestions?

Original sentence: "As new letter tiles are introduced, you will be shown which label to place them under."

Correct, but stilted: "As new letter tiles are introduced, you will be shown which label under which to place them." I changed back to the original sentence in order to preserve a conversational tone, but I know that it isn't grammatically correct.

And lastly, many could profit from a run-down on comma usage: when should we use them, when should we not. This topic could probably fill an entire article all on its own.

Marie

[Cynthia McKenna, LPC, NCC]

Yikes,
this is dangerous territory for me because my grammar, punctuation, and spelling are ALWAYS suspect - that is why I love knowing a copywriter.

This is my favorite - and is probably only native to Texas.

People who have an allergic reaction to something develop welts, not whelps. However, on any given day, you can hear people complain of being covered with puppies.

Cynthia

[Cathryn Hrudicka, Chief Imagination Officer]

Dina,

This is a great topic. One of my pet peeves is when people write "it's" instead of "its," which occurs all too frequently, especially on the Web. I've seen corporate web sites with grammatical errors. I wish everyone would proofread Web copy before posting it.

The issue of replacing "their" with "his" or "her" is a tricky one. I've seen "s/he" as a solution, but it looks odd. I've also seen a writer alternate "her" and "his," to give equal time to these gender-related pronouns.

I've also noticed mistakes using em—dashes and en-dashes—let's see if this Typepad software will pick up my facetious typing of the two different dashes. I'm also wary of exclamation point overkill!

That's my grammar drive-by for today. Happy copywriting, folks!

Cheers,

Cathryn Hrudicka
PR and Marketing Mentor™
Creative Sage™

[Bonnie Davis]

My clients drive me crazy when they use commas several times in one sentence. The apostrophe is my weakness and I have to check and double check to make sure I get it right!

Bonnie

[Soni Pitts]

Thomas Leonard, who basically created life coaching and made it into the industry it is before passing on, had a grammar tic that gives me twitches - he would "hone in" on something, instead of "homing in." And in coaching, trust me, you do a lot of "honing in," as it were.

Honing, of course, is related to sharpening or refining an edge. Homing is focusing on and heading toward a point. But although you can home in on something, you can't hone in on it, although you can hone it down to something keener and sharper if it's blunt or vague.

I can see where the overlap in concept exists enough to create the misstatement, but regardless, it's "homing in on." Period.

The thing is, this would be no big deal if Thomas hadn't been the quintessential Messianic, charismatic leader he became. But he did, and so now the coaching industry (which is huge and prolific in its writings, programs, ebooks, blogs and so on) is literally riddled with stuff being "honed in on." It would be funny, if it weren't so ironic that such usage shows a lack of a well-honed vocabulary.

By now, given the exponential growth of the industry (much of which builds off of and out of Thomas' work, as he is considered to be the Father Of Coaching), running into this is this like running into "nuculer" on CSPAN - it's everywhere, all the time and it always makes me twitch. But trying to do something about it within the industry now would be akin to a cross between sacrilege and trying to rid the South of kudzu armed with righteous outrage and a spork.

*sigh*

[Dina at Wordfeeder.com]

Soni,

As I type this, my head is abuzz with technobabble due to an unfortunate series of computer problems I have been grappling with for the past four hours.

So, I apologize if I'm reading you wrong, but you said "home in" was correct??

I'm pretty sure it's "hone in."

Here's a snippet from the dictionary for you:

Phrasal Verb(s):
hone in

1. To move or advance toward a target or goal: The missiles honed in on the military installation.
2. To direct one's attention; focus: The lawyer honed in on the gist of the plaintiff's testimony.

Thank you to everyone for these amusing quips! I must admit this is turning out to be a fun thread. Goes to show what happens when we take a minute to "point at stuff" with our marketing.

Dina a.k.a. Scrambled Brain Girl

[Susan Liddy]

hi ya!
pet peeves are soooo irritating!
thanx dina for making em fun to!
theres a few grammer mistakes that bug me!
am including many in this post!
can ya catch em all?!

;)

Susan
Aspire Life Coaching™

[DeAnna Spencer]

The worst thing for me is there, their, and they're. It drives me nuts to see those three mixed up!

DeAnna Spencer
DeAnna Spencer's Virtual Assistant Service

[Jeanette Fisher]

I would like to see standard use of quotation marks. When I see a writer using both the English custom of quotation marks after punctuation and then the United States custom of before the punctuation in the same document, I want to break into their website and fix it.

With more people speaking and writing English in China than in the U. S., do you think it's time for US to change our use of quotation marks?

[Des Walsh]

WARNING: misplaced modifiers can scramble your readers' brains.

“Whoever is writing this doesn’t have the courage to say what they are saying face to face,” Hardie said.

From the context, what was really meant was the obverse of what was written:

"Whoever is writing this doesn't have the courage to say face to face what they are saying (anonymously, on the blog)," Hardie said.

It's apparently a direct quote, but surely the blogger could have turned it into indirect speech and made the meaning clearer.
http://www.journaltimes.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=12387

[Soni]

Dina:

Yes, but most dictionaries also add this:

Middle English, from Old English hn, stone. **Hone in, alteration of home in.** [emphasis mine]

Lifted from the American Heritage Dictionary, at http://www.bartleby.com/61/19/H0261900.html

Hone in is an early-appearing eggcorn of home in, and is listed in the Eggcorn Database. http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/english/48/hone/

For those who don't know, an eggcorn is a misspelling due to mis-hearing or dialectual phoneme shift. The term comes from the first eggcorn recorded, in which the term "eggcorn" was written for the word "acorn," eg: "Even a blind squirrel will find an eggcorn once in a while."

[Soni]

PS -

Actually, the eggcorn "hone in" is given special status by being featured on the front page of the Eggcorn Database, presumably as a common example of its type.

http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

[Heidi Caswell]

Unclear pronouns. Let say you are talking about Joe, Curly and Moe. Then something like "He thumbed his nose at the police officer." I have no idea who offended the officer, could be Joe, Curly or Moe.

Cathryn, it's and its was driving my 10 year old insane last month. Her teacher said that you always use the 's for possessive. She couldn't get it. "It's madness!" she told me.

(See I do it too, the she in this case was my daughter not the teacher or even Cathryn).

Heidi

[Dina at Wordfeeder.com]

Hi Jeanette,

I would agree with you that there needs to be a consistent means of handling quotation marks.

I prefer the British method of treatment because their way is based in logic.

However, I know that stylistically, Americans have over-ridden the logic with their aesthetic preferences, so I typically follow whatever rules my clients express a preference for.

Thanks for bringing it up! I forsee a future article on the topic.

[Dina at Wordfeeder.com]

Soni,

The dictionary you cited states that "home in" is the "etymology" of "hone in," thereby attesting that "hone in" is the correct spelling of the phrase for the purposes expressed above.

Thanks though, for putting an interesting twist on our grammatical peeve chat!

Dina

[Dina at Wordfeeder.com]

Lori:

Great examples. I go through a similar thought process to arrive at my own grammatical conclusions.

Thanks to all for providing such colorful answers and creative solutions to the world's grammar issues!

Dina

[Graham]

Bad spelling is my pet peeve. It's made harder by the fact that I'm an Aussie (pronounced oZZie - another pet peeve). What is correct in the US (or should that be U.S.?) isn't always correct here. Yes, I do really think with lots of (())s.

As for the problem listed above, how about "All students should have their own set of flashcards."?

Any grammatical errors were caused by my medication.

[Graham]

With regard to quotation marks, I was taught by a little old lady with a very big stick that the punctuation, being a period or comma, went inside the quotation marks if they belonged to the content within the marks, and outside if they didn't. In certain circumstances it was permissible to have two, one in and one out.

I felt that stick every school day for two years at eight and nine years old. I don't care what any language expert says. Forty five years ago, Mrs Enright and her stick taught me that and that's how I'll stay taught

[Dina]

Graham, you nailed it. That's the "logical" aspect of quotations (and parentheses, since you brought those up). You explained it quite simply - thank you. I agree with you and Jeanette. Although like I said, if my client feels strongly about doing it the other way, that's fine by me.