My editing pet peeve - what's yours?

Microtek (sp?)

 

Ellipses.

 

What do you mean ... ellipses to indicate missing words in a quote ... or just ellipses for the sake of ellipses ... ?

 

Interesting. My pet peeve is the rampant urge to "correct" split verb phrases.

There's no legitimate grammatical reason to do so. Adverbs belong where they sound best, and that's often between the helping verb and the main verb. (It's especially galling to see folks remove the split where none exists. For example, switching "he is always late" to "he always is late." Late isn't a verb.)

Same idea with infinitives. Split away, baby. I'm not going to pull apart perfectly reasonable constructions to satisfy a long-dead generation of Latinists who foisted this "rule" upon us.

(No knock on you, Tom Petty. I love your work.)

 

First-ever and first annual.
GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!

 

ha ha. your medium is ... wait, that's right. forget it.

 

Thank you.

 

Hey, if you guys didn't have all these mistakes to correct, what would you do all day?

 

Something that bothers me, perhaps without reason, is the use of "straight" or "in a row" instead of "consecutive."

I just can't understand how the phrase "State U won its third straight game" makes any technical sense. To me, straight demonstrates some kind of linear direction of things - something that basketball games spread over seven days doesn't have. Especially with "in a row," which to me denotes that the games all took place one after another.

Oh, and not to mention that I believe it should be "third-straight game

Anyone care to explain why "straight" or "in a row" is a viable option to describe this? That way I could justify using it and not clogging up the page with so many uses of "consecutive." Or, at least, does anyone agree with me?

 

But they're not adjective modifiers.

A 1-of-9 effort makes "1-of-9" an adjective and thus, should be hyphenated.

He went 1 of 9 from the floor makes it a noun.