For I am the Lord of Grammar!

[EvilEmpryss]

Hey, HawaiianShirts, it's nice to see that I wasn't the only one to hit BookBint up for career advice.

I think I agree that it's the people in academia who are the most obnoxious: they have a degree!!! They know what they're talking about!!! They have tenure, even!!! Yet term after term I look at the syllabi that my husband gets from his university (graduate-level psych courses, mind you) and they are riddled with errors. And not just errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but errors in formatting as well. If you're going to tout that your school follows the APA manual of style, the use the APA manual of style! Nothing's more unprofessional than to have the school play "do as I say, not as I do."

It would be like BookBint replying to the grammatically impaired author with a letter filled with errors. Then again, the author probably wouldn't notice. :/

[Magpie]

One of my very few arts courses, the instructor didn't so much not get that there was a difference between "affect" and "effect" as he had them mixed up. I got the one circled on an essay.

[Eireann]

God, yes! That drives me crazier than all the other errors combined! What's really weird is when they use them for some words that end in 's' and not others.

Don't I know it! I can never understand why a word that is clearly in the plural form has an apostrophe in it.

Then you have those signs showing who lives in a house - the Smith's, the Brown's, etc.

[Magpie]

Then you have those signs showing who lives in a house - the Smith's, the Brown's, etc.

Well at least the possessive is appropriate there. It's just that they probably should have pluralized as well. (There's probably a case to be made that they didn't need to, but I say they ought to.)

[Eireann]

It would be appropriate if the house belonged to one person named Smith or Brown, and the sign meant that this was his/her house, but my feeling (which may not be correct) is that the signs are meant to say that the Smiths or the Browns live there. No apostrophe necessary.

[alogram]

You say "he", but are you sure you are not dealing with Stephenie Meyer?

[Magpie]

Ah, I always thought that they were supposed to say " Smiths' " or " Browns' ", which is just the plural of the way you looked at it. Either way, the apostrophe is incorrect.

[meghann]

Don't I know it! I can never understand why a word that is clearly in the plural form has an apostrophe in it.

Then you have those signs showing who lives in a house - the Smith's, the Brown's, etc.

At the university I briefly attended a decade or so ago, the gymnasium was named after a guy called Bill Williams.

The sign outside the gym - one of those fancy ones universities have made up to put outside all the buildings on campus; God only knows how many people had to approve it before it was actually installed - said "Bill William's Gym."

I used to cringe every time I drove past it.

[Mytical]

I write from time to time, mostly poems and short stories. I also am wise enough to know that my grammar and spelling are horrible..and that is being nice. As long as it didn't change the 'spirit' I would not whine too much about corrections. Now..if I somehow edited a Stephen King novel, and he wrote me "Change it back." yeah..I'd do that. Otherwise, you have your original, use that..and good luck. I agree with the "Just don't use my name anywhere for that book, not as Editor, not even that I looked at it!" type thing.

[EvilEmpryss]

Ah, I always thought that they were supposed to say " Smiths' " or " Browns' ", which is just the plural of the way you looked at it. Either way, the apostrophe is incorrect.

It depends on what the intended meaning of the sign is. If you intend to say that the Smith family (consisting of more than one Smith) lives in the house, then "The Smiths" is appropriate. If you intend to say that the house belongs to the Smith family (consisting of more than one Smith), then "The Smiths'" is appropriate, though a little clunky as it leaves out what it is, exactly, that the Smiths possess. If there's only one Smith living there, you would have to make the sign more descriptive: The Smith House, or some such. That would take care of all the problems.

For most instances of a family I think the first one is best. It can confusing when the last name ends in an "s", as in Williams. According to one grammar site:

When a family name (a proper noun) is pluralized, we almost always simply add an "s." So we go to visit the Smiths, the Kennedys, the Grays, etc. When a family name ends in s, x, ch, sh, or z, however, we form the plural by added -es, as in the Marches, the Joneses, the Maddoxes, the Bushes, the Rodriguezes. Do not form a family name plural by using an apostrophe; that device is reserved for creating possessive forms.

When a proper noun ends in an "s" with a hard "z" sound, we don't add any ending to form the plural: "The Chambers are coming to dinner" (not the Chamberses); "The Hodges used to live here" (not the Hodgeses). There are exceptions even to this: we say "The Joneses are coming over," and we'd probably write "The Stevenses are coming, too."

Yeah for all of the nit-picky rules of the English language!

[crazylegs]

Heh - a local tat store in my neck of the woods is called Gift's Direct. They now have three stores, all with the same error...

[EvilEmpryss]

The next time you're at a Sheetz gas station, read the warning sign about pumping gas into unapproved containers. Every single notice has the same error: "Customers maybe responsible for spills..."

I tried sending them a letter informing them of the mistake, but a year later when they built a new station here they put up the same wrong signs. :/

[Eireann]

Not long ago, I pointed out a spelling error in an email. The woman (one of those working for Loser Company - see "General Work Chat" - spelled "below" as "bellow". After attending to the matter at hand, I informed her of the misspelling.

Sure enough, the very next email I got from her contained the same error. Yes, it was a response to the email in which I had corrected her spelling. Some people just don't want to learn.

[EricKei]

Proofread the guy's letter and send it back.

Should you invest in a copy of Fowler's Modern English Usage before trying to publish anything more taxing than a grocery list? Accepted.

Better yet...Send him a proofread copy of his letter AND a copy of the book. Ideally, place little post-it flags in the chapters that describe his most egregious offenses.

Count me in as one who would like to do this sort of thing for a living; I've even done so a little bit on script edits for some homebrew video game translations.

[crashhelmet]

You could always publish the book to be sold to English and Journalism majors. They'll need something to practice their editing with

CH