SPAG Confessions!

[jlh]

You've seen those posts where people complain about their Spelling, Punctuation And Grammar pet peeves? Well, let's turn it around!



What is your SPAG Weakness?

Do you mix up -ence and -ance? Can't figure out those apostrophes? Don't see what's so bad about a split infinitive? Tell us all about it! Pimp it out to your friends! Confession is good for the soul!

Mine will be in the comments. (I'm willing to tell you but I'm not going to feature it!)

ETA: I really shouldn't have to say this, but DO NOT criticize people's spag weaknesses in the comments, please. This is about admitting that none of us are perfect, not about ragging on others for their weaknesses. Get your superiority fix elsewhere. Thanks!

Comments

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I hate commas. Ask my betas. Hell, ask my advisor.

I cannot spell words with doubled letters. Which ones are doubled? Which ones aren't? I don't know!

Lie/Lay/Laid/Lain/lookie loo, whatever, I hate all those words.

Also I forget may/might, like, which is past tense and which is future or present or whatever the hell so I always have to double check those.

[andstillitmoves.livejournal.com]

I always forget exactly what a split infinitive and the passive voice are.

[longtimegone]

I have problems with its/it's. Not that I don't know the difference so much as my fingers are incapable of choosing the right one when I am chatting :))

Also with the laid/lay/lie thing. I seriously have no idea.

I cannot spell the word "permanent" correctly. I had to look it up just then.

I totally abuse the English language on a regular basis. :>

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I constantly transpose letters when I am typing.

For a long time even though I knew it wasn't right I would type "for all intensive purposes" instead of "intents and purposes."

I hate commas. I try to never use them. It upsets people but I don't care.

[piperki.livejournal.com]

*clutches aching brain*

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

Oh no!

You aching brian!

[piperki.livejournal.com]

It's only a metaphorical ache at this point, but it prepares the way for the real thing.

I do have indigestion, though. It ought to count for something.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

Man, I typo on purpose and you don't even notice. You must be out of sorts!

I think I am ovulating...or maybe I have another damn kidney stone! yay!

We should have a lame off.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

Now, now. I know you're joking but this is a "free" zone for admitting SPAG stumbling blocks. None of us are perfect!

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

I constantly transpose letters when I am typing.

Now is this a spelling and grammar weakness, or just a product of typing as quickly as one thinks?

I hate commas. I try to never use them. It upsets people but I don't care.

Please take some of mine. They're cheap, I'm totally not asking much.

[imaginarycircus.livejournal.com]

I don't write longhand very often but I do occasionally transpose e for i, and for some reason I sometimes want to speall because with the a and u reversed. So I think it is wayward spelling.

No, no commas please! *hides behind semicolons*

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

speall

Seems more like half and half.

No, no commas please! *hides behind semicolons*

Hey, semicolons are sexy, too! I just hate full stops. Periods are the devil.

[jacyevans.livejournal.com]

When do I use then/than? What do you mean I'm writing in the present perfect tense? And how the hell DO you tell the difference between lie/lay/laid? I don't know - let's ask spell check...

[phoenixsong]

I abuse parentheticals and semicolons on LJ. I just can't seem to help myself.

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

Lie/lay/laid - will never figure those out.

I believe that sometimes a split infinitive is okay.

I abuse commas. I drop them and add them with impunity.

Passive voice - whatever. I don't think I'll ever get what's so terrible about that. Unless one is describing an up close and personal action scene. Then it's EVOL.

I mix up 'a's and 'i's in spelling sometimes. Woe.

Homophones. Oh god. I mix up rein and reign all the time. ARGH.

Strunk and White say this: A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

I fail at keeping my sentences simple and my paragraphs concise. And I don't think that's always a bad thing. :P Perhaps they should have defined "unnecessary," but I bet they thought that would be unnecessary. Booyah.

[zorb]

Evil words like persistent(tant?), pronounceable (because it turns into pronunciation, and that's just not fair), and words that either end in -tion or -sion (don't ask me which it is). Abuse of "however" and "though," as well as other adverbs. There are others, but they escape me now.

[blackholly.livejournal.com]

lay/lie/laid - I've looked it up a hundred times but I just can't seem to get it through my thick skull.

farther/further - which means which?

which/that - I've taken to using that almost all the time, incorrectly.

I also have a bad tendency to write clauses that do not modify what they should be modifying.

[a-hollow-year.livejournal.com]

which/that - I've taken to using that almost all the time, incorrectly.

I screw that up constantly as well. :(

[wordplay.livejournal.com]

lay/lie/laid Check.

farther/further Check.

which/that Not so much check, but that's because of years and years of foreign language study that require you to straighten that out.


I was just talking to aegeus about this post, and contend that at least some of these are likely language changes in progress so, really, if we can just wait 100 years we won't NEED to get lay/lie/laid/lain all sorted. How's that for a powerful disincentive?

[piperki.livejournal.com]

I don't think I have a consistent one, but when I'm tired I don't notice my own mistakes. Kind of ruins my reputation as a sharp-eyed editor.

[adjudicated.livejournal.com]

Publically, rather than publicly . . . I just recently learned the correct spelling.

[didi75.livejournal.com]

That's better than writing pubic instead of public. Spell check won't catch that! (not that I've ever made that mistake)

[seviet.livejournal.com]

Misogynist.

I always have to double-check every time I type that word (which isn't that often, but still).

[ali-wildgoose.livejournal.com]

I spent years writing "fav" all the time because I kept misspelling "favorite" as "favourite" and endlessly second-guessed myself when trying to correct it.

I only learned how to spell "ridiculous" properly because of Fiction Alley -- I used to spell it "rediculous."

I mix random bits and pieces of English spelling into things.

I hate double-letters.

Psst, I hate to point it out, but

[agarttha.livejournal.com]

Oops! You seem to have dropped the u in 'favourite'. Really, this useless eliding of perfectly necessary vowels will have to stop, you know.

[mahoni.livejournal.com]

I feel like I have a zillion.

Lie/lay/laid/lain

Dying/dieing

embarrassed or embarassed? exaggerrated or exaggerated? or something else entirely?

further/farther

who/whom

I use waaaaay too many commas

I've forgotten what most parts of a sentence are called/most names of word types, so I have no clue when I split infinitives or end a sentence with a preposition, and thus I'm sure I do these things (and others) all the time.

I use passive voice too much

I always forget when to use one - or two --

words ending in -bly throw me, because it could be -ably or -ibly or who knows what

And if all of that weren't enough, I sometimes willfully ignore the grammar and spelling rules I *do* know, because...usually because I feel like it. Gah.

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

Split infinitives. Also, I probably use too many commas.

On the plus side I am fairly anal about semi-colons; my husband, OTOH, has apparently never met one.

In general I'm an excellent speller. However, I've developed a bit of dyslexia about homonyms. I find myself using the wrong word frequently and wondering why I didn't choose the right one. Gah.

[hermorrine.livejournal.com]

Man, I mostly want to complain about other people!! But...

It's taken me a LONG time, plus actual EFFORT to be able to spell convenient and restaurant correctly. I don't know why those two words didn't work for me, but I seriously had to look them up for a long time.

Also, I confess to be an abuser of the dash - I love the dash. I can't write without it. And I have a horrible tendency to begin sentences with the word 'and.'

[titanic-days.livejournal.com]

I have no problems with any punctuation marks :;: ; : : I am practically perfect in every way.

[chinawolf.livejournal.com]

Punctuation in direct speech first and foremost. Urgh, I hate it. I used to have a firm grasp of it in German, but then I started reading English exclusively, and it's different, and by now, I can't ever tell which is the right way and when I type it, it *always* looks wrong. Also, homonyms and just plain typos. I have the unfortunate habit of not correcting typos immediately while writing (because it breaks my writing flow), but typing first and then going back through the whole text and cleaning it. Of course, then I always miss stuff.

If it counts as a weakness, run-on sentences are also a problem. I suppose that's because I'm German, though, and despite having been using more English than German for the past ten years, it will always stay my mother-tongue and I'll keep using the sentence patterns I grew up with. That's not to say that I don't speak German in English/American sentence patterns, though - I'm mostly translating English back to German in my head these days. This is highly annoying, especially when the person I speak to doesn't know English well and has no idea why I'm talking so weird.

[dramawench.livejournal.com]

Commas. They are the death of me.
I know I learned the rules once upon a time, but I'm pretty sure that I learned them incorrectly and now can't get them right in my little head!
And I'm an editor! Not good.

[sisterpandora.livejournal.com]

As to my own faults, they are too great to number. Thanks to the factory school system of public education, I missed the years wherein phonics and grammar were taught in my area. (Second grade for phonics, when the teacher went literally insane and was forcibly removed daily from the classroom for the first half of the year, and I was out for most of the second half. Seventh and eighth grades for grammar, which were missed for health reasons.)

Of those years, only the most pressing assignments were sent me, so nearly everything I know about SPaG, I've taught myself. I only passed two spelling tests during grades one through eight. The school attempted to give me a tutor in my sixth year but she was completely ineffective. I also never learnt to type properly as it was determined by those in charge of my secondary education that typing was a wave of the past and not future. Add to all this the strong chance that I have a slight dyslexia and it's all fun, fun, fun! Being a sight reader, being told to sound things out is like telling a quadriplegia to swim.

I swear, if weren't for attending the pre-school, pre-k program at a then budding private school from ages three to five, I probably wouldn't be able to read! All that being said, I love our language. All it's quarks and oddities. How one synonym exchanged for another can change the entire context of a sentence. All the glorious squabbles of British English verses American English (and I must confess to merrily mingling the two at every turn!)

(I think I should hush up before I rhapsodize yet farther from the point. Er, yeah, haven't exactly been reading modern lit lately. Brain may recover in time.)

[aome.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty good with the lay/lie/laid/lain thing (my grandparents were well-stocked with picture books that doubled as grammar books, as well as manners books), but there are some words I just cannot spell (privilege? priviledge? souvenir? souviner? souvinir?) even though I am normally a pretty good speller. And I also have trouble with interrupted spoken dialogue, if a comma is not used, or if using quotes for book/movie titles within a sentence.

"But I was the one telling her to push so hard. And Vivian -" he nodded down at the whimpering bundle in his arms, "- if she's really mine, then it's my fault Hermione got pregnant. Is that correct, with the dashes and commas where the quotes stop and start again?

I was reading "The Phantom Tollbooth" (period before or after quote marks?) What about I was singing "Do You Hear What I Hear?". Is that right? Gah.

Words with double consonants (or not)

[skg.livejournal.com]

I almost always have to look up the spelling of:

occasion
embarrassment
accommodate
harass
threshold

[glissando.livejournal.com]

I never know when to use "less" and when to use "fewer".

[february-sea.livejournal.com]

*laugh* Where to begin?

Hmmm. I abuse/misuse semicolons, commas, and ellipsis all the time.

I LOVE to split infinitives, and I think the sentence often sounds better with it split even though I know it's incorrect.

And lots of other things. :D:D

[sheron]

its/it's. ARGH.

[locumtenens.livejournal.com]

Like everyone else has said: laid/lie/lay, who/whom, etc.

Also, as Vicki said: Restaurant. I *always* want to spell it restaraunt.

One of the things I haven't seen mentioned is confusion with adverbs, and I suspect this is because it's a Southern thing. For example, people around here use the phrase, "real quick" instead of "quickly". (That's not right, is it?) Anyway, I never know when to use the 'ly' or not.

[schnoogle.livejournal.com]

I'm just generally weak. I went to school when teaching grammar and punctuation was out. I never know if what I'm doing is right or wrong. I like to think that I don't do too badly.

[innostrantsa.livejournal.com]

Best thing's to just give you the ditty:

I before e,
except after c--
or when sounding like a,
as in "neighbor" or "weigh".

I have to mumble this every time such a word is typed or written (even in public, but the mental burble guards against total embarrassment), especially "receive", a word that trips me up constantly.