These simple grammar and design mistakes bother us. What annoys you?

Qaaaaa said:

In reply to Tom1200 :

That's legal text. You do a lot of weird stuff in contracts that you don't do in normal writing.

Yes, but you declared it was pointless.

   Sincerly, your freind and professional pedant................

In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :

Our style guide is nothing fancy. I think it was born as a Word doc–actually, likely ClarisWorks or AppleWorks as it was that long ago.

We now have it online so we can all easily access it. 

The big thing for us is to create standards.

An example: How to denote a wheel’s bolt pattern? You can argue that “four by a hundred” and “4x100mm” are both correct, but how to remember how to write it next time? 

As someone that shares the "myself" misusage pet peeve...a fav line in one of our popular movies:

"Allow myself to introduce...err, myself."

bludroptop said:

Quiz question - what is the past tense of the word "sneak"?

 

Your answer tells me how old you are.  Over 60 will likely say "sneaked" while younger people almost always say "snuck".

 

Both are considered acceptable usage.

I like how you snook that in.

People saying "I'm going to the ATM machine".  That literally expands to "Automated Teller Machine Machine".  

People posting anything about their car's "breaks".  No, you mean "brakes".

People starting a sentence with "So ...", as in "So, I wanted to go to the ATM Machine but my car's breaks failed."  

I'm done complaining for the moment. 

Engrish is hard.

In my community we joke about the three tenses of "bring" (brang and brung). And contractors "higher" and "bigger" projects instead of making them taller or larger. And people bring things away with them. And they do things "a minute" ie "I'm going to town a minute". My parents were well educated in England and always spoke carefully and correctly and never got used to rural shorthand.

Ranger50 said:

Engrish is hard.

English is what you get when the design was done by a committee and the rules were written by a different committee with OCD. 

Toyman! said:

Ranger50 said:

Engrish is hard.

English is what you get when the design was done by a committee and the rules were written by a different committee with OCD. 

English is flexible not like a lithe gymnast, but like a man with all of his bones broken.

I just follow my mentor...

Gallagher had some things to say about the English language as well.

racerfink said:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Gv0H-vPoDc?rel=0

I just follow my mentor...

That's awesome!  I forgot about that one...

I'm so excited to be the first to post the best grammer joke: "eats, shoots and leaves."

I have a personal agenda against passive sentences and attributing actions to inanimate objects. The car didn't go out of control. You lost control. Cars have no agency. 

Wow – 5 pages about grammar & usage since morning coffee! I think Sarah gets the "I Started Something" award for the month.

Respectfully quoting DSW, "I’ll give you one that irks me to no end:" saying "to no end" when the phrase is actually just "no end." I know that I've probably already lost this battle and English belongs to younger people now, but "no end" means (or at any rate used to mean) without end, or boundlessly. "To no end" means without purpose.

In reply to David S. Wallens :

What I would really like for my area is a released document with a rev block that covers the last, say, five revisions so folks can see when things changed.  Or two year's worth of revisions, which ever is longer, so people can say "yeah we stopped doing that about 18 months ago".  Released so it's under revision control and reachable through the normal documents library like any other technical document.  And with lots of examples and such.

With a small org, say 50 or fewer writers, I would think a wiki would be sufficient as long as it's locked so only a few people can modify it.  And it's easy to access and pass links to each other to pertinent sections of the document.

I like tech writing and I don't love ambiguity which leads to who wants to argue more to get what they want.

Stealthtercel said:

Wow – 5 pages about grammar & usage since morning coffee! I think Sarah gets the "I Started Something" award for the month.

Respectfully quoting DSW, "I’ll give you one that irks me to no end:" saying "to no end" when the phrase is actually just "no end." I know that I've probably already lost this battle and English belongs to younger people now, but "no end" means (or at any rate used to mean) without end, or boundlessly. "To no end" means without purpose.

And "in hospital" means something different from "in the hospital", although as an unwashed American with a funny accent, I forget what the distinction is.

Ranger50 said:

Engrish is hard.

English is dumb.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

Ooh, I am going to like this thread more than the Rally Videos thread!

 

"Decimated" interests me, in that loanwords do not always bring their original meaning with them to their new language.  Japanese is really fun for this because they seem to borrow the word, but then play fast and loose with the meaning, to where a speaker of the word's original language may not recognize it.

 

"Decimated" means something different in English than it does in Latin.  If I am speaking English, it means "completely destroyed".  If I am speaking Latin, then call some priests because some supernatural unpleasantness is about to go down 

 

I agree that "incredible" SHOULD mean "not credible" instead of what it does seem to mean, but language is created by people who, by and large, ignore the rules anyway.  If I said "Subaru drops the BRZ", does that mean they released a new model, or does it mean they stopped production?  Think carefully, and remember that there are no right answers 

I despise "completely destroyed," because it's redundant. You don't say something is "partially destroyed."

thatsnowinnebago said:

I'm so excited to be the first to post the best grammer joke: "eats, shoots and leaves."

 

I have a personal agenda against passive sentences and attributing actions to inanimate objects. The car didn't go out of control. You lost control. Cars have no agency. 

It is the name of a book about grammar. 

I also try to avoid passive sentences, since we also do Tech Writing with active sentences. One of the easiest ways to catch is to avoid "to be" constructions. 

David S. Wallens said:

In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :

Our style guide is nothing fancy. I think it was born as a Word doc–actually, likely ClarisWorks or AppleWorks as it was that long ago.

We now have it online so we can all easily access it. 

The big thing for us is to create standards.

An example: How to denote a wheel’s bolt pattern? You can argue that “four by a hundred” and “4x100mm” are both correct, but how to remember how to write it next time? 

Here's a peak at the entire C section of our house style guide. 

In reply to Sarah Young :

must not make joke about cutting that out of the middle of the guide  

Reading that reminds me of a technical peeve I have and try to keep clear: the thing that bolts to the end of the crankshaft that dampens torsional harmonics is a harmonic damper.  SOME of them also incorporate crank balance weights, these can be called balancers.  But, none of them are "harmonic balancers" because they do not balance any harmonics, they damp harmonics.

If it does not have any damping properties, it is just a crank pulley or crank hub, depending on its function.

In reply to Sarah Young :

We have two massive internal style guides and then if we can't find the answer in either one, we go to the Microsoft Style Guide then if the answer isn't there, the Chicago Style Guide is next. 

Qaaaaa said:

In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :

One/two spaces is dictated by whatever style guide... IMO, it looks goofy

Same for Oxford- it doesn't actually add any clarity. Pointless, and shouldn't be used. 

 

Sarah! Tell them to stop writing "rate of speed"! Speed is already a rate!

Fixed.

pres589 (djronnebaum) said:

Can we *please* start an argument about one space behind a period or two?  I'm solidly in the two spaces camp myself, not that it matters, of course.  

Also the Oxford Comma; hot, or not?  I say hot.

One space on modern computer docs. Two spaces is a relic of the typewriter. 

Big yes on the Oxford Comma. 

I don't see it often when I'm reading a book, but magazine articles are notorious for ending a line of text with a hyphenated word that carries over to the next page. 

My father was a printer, and he considered this to be a cardinal sin.