I am certainly peeved this week with this one. I wasn’t even planning on this for a pet peeve, but it needs to be said. I’ve had it.

Writers, start paying attention! I don’t care who you are, what your age is, or what is on your resume (assuming you have one) – if you want to be taken seriously as a writer, you have to pay attention! (Watch me make a bunch of typos in this post. Ha.)

I was a staff member on two writing forums which, obviously, see a lot of beginning writers. This pet peeve is especially for those writers. This is also for my delightfully persistent spammer “Timoty” who can’t even be bothered to spell his own name right. If I’m wrong and you have a weirdly spelled name, step up and try to make a useful comment which won’t end up in my trash bin.

We all make mistakes. I understand that and have received emails about my own typing blunders. That’s the reason (beyond plain not having the time) I don’t go through and correct the grammar and spelling mistakes I find on blog posts. I usually just end up not going back to those blogs if the errors are severe and plentiful enough. As far as forum posts go, my policy is: “I’m not your spell check.” If you can’t correct the things any basic word processor would catch and/or auto correct, then you need to go back and work on it before I’ll look at it again.

What makes me really grind my teeth is when writers, who often proclaim to have the goals of getting published and being taken seriously as a writer, spell titles wrong. Yes, titles. You’ve gone to the trouble of writing something, gathering the courage (or simply stroking your ego enough) to post it up, and you don’t take the care to spell your title correctly?

I wouldn’t be as peeved about this as I am if I wasn’t all too aware that:

*if you have a blog, it’s easy to edit the title. Plus the entire post for that matter.

*on both of the forums I was staff on, it’s just as easy to edit your title. On all forums I’ve been a member of, you can either do it yourself or contact a staff member to do so.

Want to know a little secret? If you don’t spell the title of your post (blog, forum, or otherwise) right, I’m not going to read it. I won’t read the first word, the first line, or the first paragraph. Nada. Harsh? No. You want to be a writer? Pay attention at least enough to do me this favor. Always keep in mind what your readers will see/read first. Always.

When it comes to poetry – free verse poetry – there is a thin line to tread between poetry and prose.

This
is not
poetry.

You could argue it is poetry. You could say it’s some sort of artistic statement. That’s the annoying thing about poetry. However, there are entirely too many people who consider themselves poets because they put strange line breaks in prose that reads just like prose when the line breaks aren’t there. An example:

You could argue
it is poetry.
You could say
it’s some sort of
artistic
statement.
That’s
the annoying thing about poetry.

Don’t. Just don’t do that. If you can remove the line breaks and it reads like prose, it is prose.

Yes, there is such a thing as prose poetry, but even prose poetry reads slightly different than regular prose. It’s closer to the prose line than any other poetry is/should be, but it’s still poetry in that it doesn’t read like regular prose.

Yes, I’m repeating myself, but I’ve seen this happen entirely too many times.

You don’t have to rhyme, but you do have to write poetry if you’re a poet.