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Joined: 6/7/2013 Posts: 1356
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Random House copy chief Benjamin Dreyer has an AWESOME post on Medium clarifying some common mistakes he finds in manuscripts. You must read this; I learned so much from it!
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Joined: 3/4/2014 Posts: 19
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Rather embarrassing how many of those mistakes I commit on a daily basis.
Good resource to have; I'm sure I'll be referring to it on a daily basis this NaNo.
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Joined: 6/14/2012 Posts: 194
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Saw another one pointed out today on Twitter by Elspeth Cooper: muscles can be corded, but not chorded. (Although we then had a lively consideration of bioengineered muscles that emitted electrical signals you could turn into sounds and thus produce chords...love it when mistakes suggest story ideas.)
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Joined: 6/14/2012 Posts: 194
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And I forgot to mention one that infuriates me: a confusion between reins (what you hold when riding a horse) and reigns (3rd person present singular of verb "to reign", to rule.) I see too many books and posts in which someone talks about how someone holds the "reigns."
And what about "lede" which is now apparently the fashionable spelling for "lead"--the way it was taught in journalism class in high school (mumble-mumble) years ago. In the old days (she quavers) people who worked around newspapers had no trouble distinguishing lead as -first-sentence-of-article from lead-as-that-metal-letter-shapes-were-made-of-for-printing.
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Joined: 7/18/2014 Posts: 121
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One of my biggest complaints, and I see it daily in various forums and on Facebook posts - the misuse of 'than' and 'then.' I also notice, these days, that people simply cannot spell anymore, and haven't a clue about grammar, punctuation or what constitutes a sentence. They'll ram several thoughts into a long string of words that would normally be two or even three sentences. These are all basic rules I learned in grammar school from the Nuns.
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