Minding your P’s and Q’s
Welcome back to another blog hop, with #OpenBook. Here’s this week’s prompt.
What are your pet peeves when it comes to grammar and spelling?
Really? you’re talking to the wrong person here.
You have to remember, I failed English at school, managed to scrape a bare pass at the third attempt and picked up written English as I went along. My handwriting is appalling as well, it’s so bad that I could have been a doctor.
Having to sweat over writing reports and official letters when I was a senior ships officer was purgatory. I often survived by making sure that there was a number in every box. Nobody ever complained, perhaps that showed just how important a lot of the paperwork was.
The greatest invention ever, and what enabled me to write novels, was the F7 key (The mighty spellcheck).
I’m also a firm believer that I shouldn’t criticise the mistakes of others in public. Perhaps I might have a quiet word, if I know the person really well but otherwise, I’m not perfect myself, see above.
I’ve been involved in and seen enough arguments over trivialities to know that it’s not worth it.
A lot of the time, the rules and structures of written English pass me by completely. I’ll find a discussion about oxford comma’s or the merits of single/double quote marks and my eyes glaze over.
Which is not to say that I don’t agree that published work should be pristine, it should be and it should follow all the rules.
It’s just that I don’t know what they are.
That’s why I have an editor. I have to admit to being in awe of her, she’s wonderful and spots all my mistakes.
Anyway, getting back to the subject.
What does annoy me is a typo on page one of a new novel. It grates and sets the tone for the rest; no matter how good it might be. It doesn’t matter what it is, a misplaced capital, the wrong word in a sentence, or just a spelling mistake.
I actually had a review for one of my books which said, “Unusually for a self-published book, it is almost entirely free from grammatical or typographical errors.” There are several ways you can take a comment like that, I chose to see it as a compliment.
And the presumption that I saw when my daughters were at school; one of their teachers told me that spelling and grammar didn’t matter too much, as long as you could understand what was being said.
I could never see how that would work on a job application, an insurance policy, the last will and testament.
Or the deeds to my house.
How about you, what are your pet hates, when it comes to spelling and grammar?
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