Reading a hunka-hunka burnin' verbiage during a 10-hour shift yesterday, I came across some Personal Copy Pet Peeves (PCPP):
• Continued use of "in fact," as it tends to be superfluous and take up precious column inches. i.e. Linus was whiny. In fact, he was also short.
• Extraneous use of "that."
i.e. She said that she was sick of writers' excessive use of extra words.
• Using "different" after a number, as below. Again, this is implicit in what's already being said.
i.e. The hellhole* Chinatown apartment was home to more than 100 different species of insects.
• Unnecessary "up"-iness, and other preposition overuse.
i.e. Tighten up, loosen up, open up, close down, reading through, and (my personal favorite) off of.
We all have PCCPs. What're yours?
*One word or two? You decide.
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3 comments:
The serial comma. Why do some places insist on it?
I honestly don't know! I think it's one of those old-fashioned things some are still holding to. We have debates about it at my office. Me, I'm staunchly anti-serial comma!
I hate the double space after sentences. I especially hate copy with an arbitrary number of spaces between each sentence (anywhere from one to four), which I unfortunately encounter daily.
I only like serial commas when one of the items in the list has an "and" in it already.
I despise excessive quotation marks to set off supposedly clever or obscure words.
And I prefer hell hole (or heck hole for family publications).
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