That Semicolon is Killing Me #IWSG

A sign at the local coffee shop had me giggling and wincing at the same time. It read:

Dear Customers;

EFTPOS is temporarily unavailable.

Sorry for the convenience

The owners of the shop may have heard my guffaw because, not a minute later, the sign was taken down and a new one put up. Convenience was changed to inconvenience. But the semicolon remained. It made me squirm as if I had a tick in my eye.

Do you have trouble ignoring the bad grammar or punctuation around you? Do you correct presenters on TV shows, rewrite sentences while reading published books, chuckle at dodgy sentence structure on goods? Have you influenced your non-writing family member enough that he or she also corrects the bad grammar?

If you’ve said yes to any of these questions, then I have bad news for you: You are cursed. Yes, cursed. There’s no going back to being blissfully unaware of typos, comma splices, or dangling modifiers. You are doomed to annoy your friends (or bite your tongue a lot), fated to spend hours nit-picking over your work, ruined for the rest of your literary life.

The good news is, you’ve also been blessed. Why? Because you are a writer, and being a writer is the best thing in the world. Go on, you can admit it. It’s safe here.

What are some of the funniest mistakes you’ve made or seen? How do you survive the errors everywhere?

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This post was written for the IWSG Group. We post on the first Wednesday of the month. Sign up is HERE.

I’m posting early because I wanted to remind everyone about the impending deadline for The Insecure Writer’s Support Group Guide to Publishing and Beyond. It’s chugging toward us at a rapid pace. Not the book, but the deadline for submissions, which is October 2nd. We’re looking for articles on writing, publishing and marketing. For the guidelines, click HERE.

While we prefer email submissions, TheIWSG[at]gmail[dot]com, if you are submitting via your blog, then make sure to use the book sign up sheet so we don't miss your awesome work.