I confess, I read 50+ blog posts a day. I follow so many great people on Bloglovin’, it’s almost embarrassing. Another embarrassing thing… there’s quite a few bloggers who have less than perfect grammar skills…or maybe its a malfunctioning Spellchecker option! That annoys me so much. It’s such a huge pet peeve of mine to be reading a super creative, interesting, supposedly well-written post and then hit the brick wall that is a grammatical error. I can’t read any more after that! Sometimes the error is so simple as leaving an “s” off an obviously plural word or a typo.
For example… here are some errors in a couple of the posts I read this morning (I’m protecting the identities of the blog writers for their own good).
* What was written: “So looking at overprices houses is just depressing.” Should be “overpriced” and technically should have a coma after “So”.
* What was written: “He’s almost never home and I generally couldn’t care less about it beingmessy…” Should be “being messy”, two words.
* What was written: “…made me appreciate the little community we’ve built of the past few years.” Probably should be “over the past few years.”
* What was written: “Cool would be how I would describe the effortless gals in Austin, TX (which I why I could never live there).” Should be “…(which is why I could never live there).” But major props for putting the period outside the parenthesis!
* What was written: (same post as the Austin one above) “…they laid out their clothes the nights before in a planning moment.” Should be “…night before…”…”night” singular.
* What was written: (still same post) “Needs to be easy to take on an off…” Should be “…on and off…”
* What was written: (again, same post) “…it can’t come off as if you are trying to hard to be cool…” Should be “…trying too hard to be cool…”
* What was written: “Housework and cooking is absolutely part of the gig and is doable.” Should be “Housework and cooking are absolutely part of the gig…”
I’ll stop now, but there are many, many more…
I’m sure the “oopsies” above were byproducts of being in a hurry, being distracted, a faulty spellchecker or something else…we all make mistakes and I’m certainly not trying to bash someone’s talent or writing skills. I’m a million times guilty of my fingers typing faster than my brain thinks, I’m just really anal about my words and phrases being written correctly. I’m sure if you look back through my archives, you’ll find numerous, if not hundreds of errors… I can’t look back or I’ll want to correct them all and that would make me insane!
If you’re worried you’re one of “those” bloggers, I can help. My degree is in journalism and I love all things grammar. I spent nearly 10 years as a television/radio news producer and have always caught grammar errors in writings… they just jump out at me with red flags and flashing lights! I have partially edited a book manuscript and I would love to do more, including daily blog posts.
If you would like me to proofread your post before you post it (I promise I won’t change the actual content, just look for grammatical errors and typos), just shoot me an email at susan@susancoferfell.com We can discuss options, pricing, etc.
Until next time…
Happy Blogging!
