5 “Fustrating” Grammar Pet Peeves

Yep, I’m THAT person. The one silently judging you as you speak or write. I can’t help it; I’m a writer. And really, don’t you want me to judge you? Wouldn’t you expect the writer to continually evaluate every word uttered around her? Doesn’t that mean I’m good at my job?

In my defense, I rarely correct anyone anymore, mostly because I decided having friends was more important than my pathological desire for grammatical perfection.

However, there are certain errors that are more difficult for me to ignore. I figured by ranting about them in a blog post, I’m not exactly judging anyone directly and will therefore keep all my friends, right?! (She says with desperation.)I’m not even going to touch the old pet peeve standards: its/it’s and they’re/their/there. Those have been covered ad nauseam—and sadly, they’re all still constantly misused. Although in fairness, those cases are often more mistaken misuse than ignorant misuse.

These are my special pet peeves. I’m curious to know how you feel about them.

1. Fustrated This one literally causes an involuntary shudder when I hear it. There’s something almost mean (and perhaps a touch ironic) that of all words, this particular one is so often mispronounced. It’s frustrating, no?

2. Unnecessary Quotes The funny thing about unnecessary quotation marks is that they often add a sinister undertone to whatever is being communicated.

3. Random Capitalization I don’t get this one. I really don’t. Unless you grew up in Germany, there’s no excuse for randomly capitalizing some words and not others. And I’m not just talking headlines—just regular ol’ text. Nouns, adjectives, even *gasp, the horror* prepositions will stand tall amongst their lowercase peers for no reason at all. It’s just senseless.

4. Misused Apostrophes Ahh, I didn’t want to go here. I really didn’t. But I had to. I’m not sure if there’s anything more irksome or more perplexing than the grammatical abominations caused by misused and misplaced apostrophes. I’m not really sure what’s so difficult about the concept. Commas, sure. Those suckers can be tricky, which is why they don’t make this list. But apostrophes are really pretty easy. And when in doubt, check The Oatmeal.

5. Semicolon HateI <3 the semicolon. It’s such a lovely little piece of punctuation. Neither a hard stop nor a slight pause, the semicolon has multiple uses in writing. Some call it a super comma. And come on, everyone loves superheroes these days.

I don’t get the hate. Hate usually comes from a lack of understanding, and I think that’s certainly the case here. Some people don’t see the point, or don’t get the distinction of when it’s appropriate to include. Let me help by directing your attention to this infographic, which uses a combination of bears, hairy knuckle shampoo and agreeable dinosaurs to demonstrate when and how to use semicolons properly.