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Worst writing boo-boo’s boobooes typos

Eegad, once again I sent off an email with a word missing, making my message sound ambiguous. As well as just plain sloppy. The compulsive ferret in my brain pushes me to send yet another email with the corrections. And so it goes, even with published webpages such as blog posts.

Lorelle’s encouraging Blogging Challenge article impelled me to write about my most common, and to me one of my worst typos, absent words. (This had been sitting as a draft for several months, mainly for gathering examples.) In spite of the frustrating “Gah, how did I miss that?” feeling, the easy thing about online publishing (like WordPress) is that it’s oh-so-easy to edit. Little time is needed for fussing —plink— there, it’s fixed!

Well, for blog articles. Comments posts are more difficult, since a commenter can rarely re-edit a comment. (Although the site moderator usually can.) Being able to preview comments does help, though it’s not a ubiquitous feature —at least not in WordPress. (But that’s where the Comments Preview plugin saves the day.)

Anyhow, my most commonly administered ;-P booboos:

  • Forgetting small words like modifiers, prepositions, or even articles. The absence of a to, of, the or a falls under the “whoops, spaced out” category. But leaving out a no or not, utterly changes the intent, i.e., the angrier “$%#@, screwed up!” category.
  • Or, worse, when my hands (but not my mind) actually forget a key verb or noun. “Just reservations” when I meant “just made reservations.”
  • The following is an odd situation, considering how I irked I become when people cannot remember that its is possessive and it’s is the contraction. (Remember, no apostrophes in possessive pronouns! Hers, theirs, his, ours, its.) My Achilles’ heal of homophones is your vs. you’re. Perhaps the auditory part of my brain keeps interfering with the hand-touch aspect of language: “Your going to confuse you’re possessives with a contraction.”

Or, are you? What mnemonics or tools (other than spellcheckers) do you use to help you avoid typos or other writing flubs?

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