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The Ten Grammar Mistakes That Anger Your Readers The Most

I've written an entire chapter on my thoughts on grammar Nazis. One of the final conclusions of the chapter is that you should do everything in your power to fix the kinds of things that upset your readers. Grammar Nazis are, love it or hate it, a part of your reading audience. You should, for all intent and purposes, try to fix your grammar, because there are people who, upon reaching certain annoying things, become annoyed. Go figure. 

But what kind of things are the annoying things? Everyone has their trigger, and until you spend $1000 and hire a professional editor you can't expect your writing to hold up to the rigors of perfection. So, at some point and time, you need to focus on the particular things that trigger people into an over the top rage. That is what this chapter is for. If you want to hardcore edit your chapter and avoid some of the worst mistakes, I recommend you take a look at my chapter titled 'Editing 201'. However, if you just don't want to trigger your readers, here is the list of 10 things you need to fix before posting your work to the public.

I don't think anything here is something I haven't said before, but this list is probably the most important points you need to hit to prevent pissing off your readers. It is a list I'll admit I haven't honored in this very book (and have received comments as a result), but if you want happy readers, think about fixing these things ASAP. Nothing induces reader rage quite like...

Messing Up Their, There, They're, Your, You're, Its, It's

When two words sound the same and have basically the same purpose it can be quite easy to mix them up, yet hours of people's rage and obnoxious replies have been dedicated to this harmless mistake. To the people whom this drives crazy, it is an inexcusable act of writing suicide, a rage-inducing murder of the precious English language that "even babies" should be able to avoid making. To the rest of us who don't give a crap, we just shake our heads and sigh.

I won't say that I'm above making this mistake myself. Typically, this mistake can easily be caught and vetted by the current spelling/grammar software, especially after you supplement it with something like Grammarly. Although I suspect whether some people use spell check and grammar software, let alone extra programs, prior to putting their work online. However, even if they did use all the bells and whistles, Grammarly doesn't always catch these mistakes 100% of the time.

Therefore, if you don't want to receive the obnoxious:

"Ah, ahem... it's their, not there, I thought YOU of all people would realize this. Now excuse me while I enjoy the smell of my own farts."

Then you may want to take the added effort of doing a search specifically for those 7 golden words. Once you make sure they are all used correctly, then you can post with the peace of mind that you will receive one less obnoxious comment.

Tense Mistakes

In the past, I gave the advice that if you're going to write, concentrate on past tense and get good at that. I'd argue that while bad past tense hurts a story, bad present tense makes a story literally unreadable. A part of the reason for this is simple. Writing in present tense still requires you to flip to past. Whenever you're referring to something that happened, even a few moments ago, you'll have to use past tense, and then flip to present again when you're back to the now. It's obnoxiously easy to make this mistake.

And worst, if you're doing something like say, writing a present tense novel and at the same time you are writing past tense novels, it becomes a nightmare. I used to have no problem with my tenses, but now that I've started flipping between the tenses, getting them correct is almost impossible. So, I typically recommend you stick to past... because everything in past is in the past. The only thing "present" always occurs within quotation marks (dialogue), thus making it really easy to not make that kind of error.