Grammar is boring. Writing mechanics are fiddly. Why bother? Well,

• incorrect writing is unclear and inelegant;

• it’s no fun to read; and

• it peeves gatekeepers and readers.

Anyone who edits and evaluates writing for a living is going to have a set of pet peeves — errors they see over and over again, which annoy them and which prove a writer doesn’t know what they’re doing. It’s hard to appreciate an author’s brilliant message or story if all you see is what they’re doing wrong.

You want to win over readers and gatekeepers by writing correctly.  So on this advice blogroll, I’m going to explain some of the most common errors I see, time and time again, and how to fix them.

This will include clear explanations of common writers’ banes like sentence fragments, comma splices, dangling modifiers, faulty parallelism, and more. Let the fun begin!