Your Highness: I’m not much of a writer but, like so many of your loyal subjects, I have a job that often requires me to write. I want to be professional—and avoid embarrassing mistakes. I need an on-call editor. Or at least a cheat sheet. Please help! My dear Subject, Ah, English! Constantly changing, constantly [...]
Posts Tagged ‘typos’
Quotation Dos and Don’ts
Your Highness: I hold a job that requires I write articles, press releases, and similar pieces in which I quote others. You’d think I’d have such matters down by now, but I’ll come clean: I never really learned the rules for using quotation marks. To complicate matters further, I’m a bit of an Anglophile—only the [...]
Typos of Death
There are just some typos you can’t forget – even if you want to.
Damn You, Autocorrect: Bringing Writerly Mortification to the Masses
When those pesky demons get into the phone, the results are both embarrassing and (for once, literally) laugh-out-loud funny.
Excuse Your Typos? No I Won’t, Actually
As our fingers fly across our smartphones, we’ve developed a shorthand way to dash off messages without spending too much time on the finer points of spelling and grammar. “C U later” and “gr8” substitute for actual language when we’re communicating via the small screen. Makes you wonder what the great writers would have done [...]
Can’t Turn It Off
Being a writer is not something one can just turn off at 5 p.m. It’s an all-encompassing desire to analyze and edit all the verbiage one encounters in daily life.
