Thumpa Thumpa

My little heart goes pitter patter as I read this article:

The 32 Most Commonly Misused Words and Phrases

I will admit I have used "alright" in the past, but not likely for any sort of formal document... although that is a poor excuse.  Occasionally I have to stop and think about "stationary" versus "stationery", but at least I stop to think about it.  "Could of" is one of the things that drives me mad, as does "whose" and "who's", but look, look, look!

19. Literally- If you say “His head literally exploded because he was so mad!” then we should see brains splattered on the ceiling.

Thumpa thumpa. <3 <3 <3 I could, like, literally die because this list is so good.

one more thing

I forgot to add this in my last post, because I forgot it existed.  That is how horrible it is: I can actually succeed at putting it out of my memory.  At least, that's what I'm going to pretend.

peek (v): to glance, to look at briefly. "She took a sneak peek at the new merchandaise."
peak (n): the extreme, maximum, vertex, acme. "She was at the peak of her career."

As you can see, "peek" is a verb, whereas "peak" is a noun.  The latter is not so unique that it can be, um, verbified, like, "Hey, let me Google that." 

So therefore, this is completely unacceptable: "Let's start off this blog post/tutorial/news article by taking a peak at what's actually going on here."

Argh! I see it so often, too.  I am terrified that one day, it will be standard to use "peak" instead of "peek".  I hate it so much, it makes me want to stab my eyes out.

Not Proofreading This Post

Sometimes I wonder if anybody even bothers to proofread any more, online or offline.  Proofreading takes extra time, yes.  Proofreading requires thought, yes.  Proofreading is boring, yes.  But proofreading is good! 

Blogs seem to be especially bad with this, since they already carry a "this just came from my head, seriously" type of essence.  But they don't need to sound like that all of the time.  This especially goes to people who manage public blogs.  Shame!  It's not enough to write a post, run the spellchecker, and then click "Publish."  Their are many things that due knot got fixed unless yew seas them when you've proofreading! 

Spelling errors and grammar mistakes usually make up the bulk of these very easy-to-catch items, but the ones that really irk me are the ones that are obviously side-effects of an edit.  The incorrect tense that went with a different phrasing.  The incomplete word that used to begin or end a sentence.  The phrase that is repeated at least twice, maybe more, but written differently each time. It's obvious to me that you took the time to re-edit the sentence.  But did you read it after you "fixed" it?

I'm not talking about small errors, like easy typos, where one letter is replqced by another, or where the order of charcaters gets a little scrambled.  I'm talking about obvious mistakes that you can catch just by doing one read-through.  When you publish something that is obviously not proofread, it says to the reader, "I didn't read my own article, why should you?"

And if you're going to argue that "replqced" and "charcaters" are obvious, well, you were looking for them, weren't you?

Affect vs. Effect

Recently I sent out a survey related to a study I began at work, looking at blogging and microblogging behaviours. The study actually started as a secondary topic, the primary being a design/display project for the summer, to display IBM-related tweets. The goal of the study was to find out how microblogging and blogging practices interact, if at all. When I was going over the open-ended answers in the survey, I noticed that I had written this sentence:

If you both blog and microblog, how has your use of either tool affected the other?

At first, I groaned inwardly--what utter mortification! Did 300 people just see a huge grammar error? Is it not an "effect" that I'm asking about, and not an "affect"? Should it not be, "[...] how has your use of either effected the other?" But comparing "effected" and "affected", the former doesn't look right either.

Now completely confused, it's time to turn to Google to do the work for me. A suggestion is given for "define: effected"--"Did you mean: define: affected?" Accepting the new search yields this as one of the answers:

affect - have an effect upon

Ah-ha! Hello, confusing near-homophone! And now I remember a simple rule, which is often broken:

affect = verb ("My blog will affect my microblogging habits.")
effect = noun ("My blog has an effect on my microblogging habits.")

So it seems that my original sentence was correct, and there was no need to second-guess myself. Yet despite the simplicity of separation, the two words are easily confused.

For a longer (and probably better) explanation, check out Grammar Girl's article on this very topic. More confusion can be supplied by Randall Munroe.