Most writers have their arch nemesis, those fickle words that just won’t appear on the screen properly. Backwards vowels, missing letters, a correct spelling that ultimately is the demise of the sentence because it’s the wrong, freaking word.

When reading over work, especially your own, it’s easy for your eyes to fill in the missing gaps, rearrange words into a proper order, even delete instances of times when mistakes like “the-the” occur. This is one of the reasons a writer needs to set aside a book for long enough to forget the word structure or have someone else look the story over.

Here’s a short list of some of my most common mistakes, the ones that I can remember off the top of my head because they happen so often. This list is not comprehensive and I have done much, much worse, up to and including typing in rhyming words or even typing a synonym or close-to a synonym in place of the word I wanted to write. Continue reading →