Wriging

Not editing my writing. Going on and on and on and on and on. Because I get excited.

Personally, I find the hackneyed nature of cliche irony and extraneous plot twists quite annoying. I don't do it, but others do.

bloglily: not editing is a frequent issue with me too. You have no idea how many times I've said "oh I need to go back to that later and sort that out" and just haven't.

"none of use are perfect" - Irony at its best. :P

The most common mistake in my writing is just about the same as yours. I have a knack for writing run-on sentences, it seems. I try and go over most of my stuff before I hit submit, though.

Sometimes I can misspell words and not even know it - for example, "itself" always got me. There are some words that I've been misspelling my entire life and never knew about. Kind of creepy to discover things like that.

"none of use are perfect" - Irony at its best. :P

Oops! No, wait... that was totally intentional! To, uh, yeah... irony.

Crap.

(I would change it, but it won't let me edit! I'm doomed to look like an idiot forever. Much to Erin's amusement.)

Wordiness. I know it's not a grammatical error, but still.

I try to put relevance to everything---I write because something affects me, not because I thought of a topic---and this can lead to a lot of unnecessary backstory and babbling.

Usually when I write a post, I hit the highlights and get out what I originally intended on saying, then read and destroy what I wrote. The second time around it'll come out with less garbage.

I try to limit the number of times I do that when blogging though. If I didn't, I'd spend a week over analyzing my own choice of words.

I'd say I don't mix tense much, but I caught myself doing it this morning, heh.

I've got the comma issue too, or at least I'm afraid I do.

Hmm... good question. I know I use the ellipsis too much and in all the wrong places. I make spelling errors that my eyes don't pick up on, even when I proofread. Honestly, though, I think my biggest problem is actually being too formal in my writing. I use colons, semicolons, dashes and such which, while being grammatically correct, make me feel like I should be wearing tweed and standing at a podium. So when I proofread, I sometimes try to informalize my stuff. Right, and I make up words. Like informalize.

You look lovely in tweed, Erin.

I'm glad to hear I'm not the only person who can't shut up.

For a long time I spelled publicly "publically" and then one day I spelled it "pubicly" and someone pointed out to me that that is a word I should just stop using. So I did.

This isn't necessarily a blogging faux pas, but it's related. Some people on blogs or message boards like to correct other peoples' grammar (OPG). God knows I've done it myself when it was particularly bad (e.g., someone totally mangling a difficult word, when an easier word would have sufficed). Inevitably, I've made a typo or mistake in the post where I've attempted to correct someone else.

One day I was thinking there had to be a name for the phenomenon.

There is.

Skitt's law, a.k.a. Merphy's Law (get it?), holds that the first post correcting a previous grammatical or spelling error will also contain a spelling/grammar error.

There's only one sure-fire way to avoid falling victim to your own perfection: don't go around correcting people. Failing that, proofread like a mother. Literally. Proofread like your mother.

I, use, far, too, many, commas, in, my, writing. :D

I use too many ellipses... and use them improperly... and sometimes no sentence starting with a capital letter... but being dyslexic and not an english guy I forgive myself these small faults.