Pet Peeves from the Copyblogger Editorial Team, and What they Reveal

Pet Peeves from the Copyblogger Editorial Team, and What they Reveal

Reader Comments (21)

  1. Hello Sonia,
    I always refrain from using the Oxford Comma. it has always bugged me as if it is an extra piece of art kept to showcase the article is written by a Grammar Nazi who is trying to prove his point with punctuations and not content. That is my peeve.

  2. Something that really bothers me is sloppy speech. When someone uses “every” for “ever’ as in “Every since he moved, his cat has been lonely”. When clearly it’s “Ever since…..”.
    I believe that this peeve shows that I’m not comfortable with the general lack of quality that is a part of our culture.

  3. I really enjoyed this post! It is all so true. As a longtime editor of book manuscripts, I can relate to all of these. Another one that gets to me is when a writer will cram several paragraphs into one huge one. Run-on sentences get next to me as well! Great post! Thanks again!

  4. My pet peeve is when an ad or headline doesn’t deliver on the promise in any way. I just read one that was close to, “A one-minute mindfulness technique to stop being lazy.” I read the article and at the top, there was another promise, that the article was a two-minute article.

    It took about four minutes to read and I’m a moderate to fast reader. And the mindfulness exercise? There was none. There wasn’t even an exercise in the article or anything that could even be adapted to be one.

  5. Besides the obvious ones (using “less” when “few” is proper, failing to differentiate between homonyms, properly using the apostrophe with its and it’s), there are a number of somewhat more subtle ones that bug me. For instance, I have a boss whose reports I edit who persists in writing things along this line: “This patient has been with me during the last ten years” instead of “this patient has been with me *for* the last ten years”. The expression “centered around” bothers me. How does one “center around” a thing?

  6. My pet peeve is the usage of semicolon ( ; ). I often get bugged by people using semi-colon just for the sake of it. I would suggest not to use a semicolon if you have no idea.

  7. Oh, where to begin? OK, how about this: I have seen even learned women write about a female as a “women.” Unbelievable. Do they refer to individual males as “men”? Not likely. Also, pronouncing lackadaisical as laxadaisical.

  8. A personal peeve is using it’s instead of its (and the opposite). It sets my teeth on edge because it’s so common. The only thing that bothers me more is when I find that I’ve done it myself when drafting!

  9. My biggest pet peeve lately is the phrase “at the intersection of” and variants of the same. I blame Steve Jobs for popularizing this one. It was a clever turn of phrase once. Now it’s a cliche.

    Second pet peeve: People who don’t use the Oxford Comma. =)

  10. Gotta be honest, I skimmed this entire article for the basic peeves (listicle-style), skipping the commentary almost entirely – except for the G-A-S bit, which suckered me in. I’m assuming that was the whole point anyway, lol…

  11. Overuse of the word “eponymous” in Wikipedia articles, and in general, imitative writing, “price point” instead of “price,” and the worst of all, “that being said.”

  12. “learnt” and “gotten”. Not words in my version of English.
    Drives me nuts when I see them used in a serious post or article.

  13. My biggest pet peeve is using ‘Now’, ‘also’ at the beginning of every sentence of an article. I don’t like it. But I am myself doing it most of the times. Although I am trying not to do it, but still end up doing so every now and then.

  14. When people say “prior to” instead of “before.” Dave Eggers has a whole essay dedicated to this. Prior is (or originally was) an adjective, not an adverb. It’s needlessly pretentious to say “prior to” instead of just saying “before.”

  15. I am with Loryn here! There is nothing more annoying that people using “over” to precede a number within copy.

    Great job, Sonia. I really enjoyed this.

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