Essay Pet Peeves

My take is that it’s more important to be thoughtful about your choices than it is to be didactic.

Although alot is never going to be a word and you can’t make it one. Jerod’s a person with a strong moral compass, and I was interested to see his peeves.

We’ve written quite a bit lately about identifying core values in your content.

Creating content around a positive value like integrity, fairness, humility, or faith will attract an audience that shares those values — and that fosters a powerful sense of unity.

For today’s post, I asked our editorial team to let us know their peeves — the things that irritate, bother, and annoy them.

I’m going to try to tease those out and figure out the values behind them — and see what that might say about who we are as a company and a community. Stefanie is our editor-in-chief, and as you’d expect, she has a healthy list of grammar and usage peeves. It’s one thing to misplace a comma — it’s another to come at a post in a fundamentally flawed way.It’s not really grammar, but it still makes me cringe. Misspelling a name in content is a classic example in failure of what Jerod calls Primility (the intersection between pride and humility).It’s both sloppy (lack of pride) and disrespectful (lack of humility).We love producing the blog, and we try hard to make it excellent. We’re under no illusion that this blog is perfect, and we try to challenge each other to always make it more relevant, more useful, and more interesting. We’ve never endorsed the paint-by-numbers approach to marketing and online business …You may feel like you already know more than you need to about my peeves. partly because that would be very boring, and mostly because it just doesn’t work.Quality of information, quality of business practices, quality of writing.You’ve only seen Loryn on the blog once (so far), but she’s crucial to our editorial success.Every time I catch myself writing “over 5%…” in a report, I go back and change it to “more than.” Now, the Associated Press said in 2014 that both “over” and “more than” are acceptable to use with numeric comparisons — as in, “There were over two hundred people at the event.” But you know what? In my mind, “over” mixes the abstract world with the physical realm.For example, if you were to say, “We flew over 6,000 miles …” you could be saying that you flew more than 6,000 miles.But our friend negativity bias tells us that the flip side of that will probably be more compelling.In other words, talking about the things that bug you will build an even faster bond with your audience.