Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
An example: I was reading a book recently in which the author was fond of using the word "awhile", but was clearly unaware of the grammatical difference between "awhile" (an adverb meaning "for a length of time") and "a while" (a noun meaning "a length of time"), and hence kept saying things like "we stopped for awhile", which is just plain wrong; you can say either "we stopped awhile" or "we stopped for a while", but not "we stopped for awhile". That was a commercially published book, too. THAT'S the kind of thing that bugs me.
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...and THATS the kind of thing I have an editor for!
I consistently get that kind of thing wrong. Then/than appear to be my favorite mix up currently.
But the thing is for me, and I am sure I am not atypical, there are certain errors I am just blind too. For example intellectually I know that than is a conjunction used in comparisons and then is not. So I know that :
Jill is better then David at math.
is wrong, but for some reason I never see that error in my manuscript. My brain just seems to ALWAYS use then, regardless of the correct answer.
So if random author number ten can not get an editor for some reason, I expect that things like then/than that are obvious to others slip through. I do not think its due to lack of knowledge in all cases, just everyone has blind areas.
Now, commas, are, an, area, where, I, really, just, do, not, undertand, the, rules, at, all. My poor editor! LOL