The "brain quirk" I'm referring to is this: if I see a word spelled wrongly, or the use of a wrong word or a blatantly wrong piece of punctuation, I just can't get past it. (This is not the same as there being typos in a piece of writing, which I easily skip over.) For instance, it often happens nowadays that a writer will use "it's" when they probably mean "its"; the problem for me is that it stops me dead in my tracks and all I can think about is worrying about whether I've got the writer's meaning right, or whether they really did mean what they wrote; but usually, it's impossible to interpret the piece using the words they've used, so I find that I just can't read the rest of the article. (Another one recently was "Bare with me a moment here ..." What on earth could the writer have meant?)
I'm serious about this. It's not me being picky. I genuinely cannot finish articles where this sort of thing happens. ("Could of" or "should of" are other examples.) Now, you will see that I am aware of what the writers in these cases probably meant, but honestly, I just can't get past the - probable - error.
Does anyone else have this "brain quirk"? It's starting to get annoying ...
![confused :-?](./images/smilies/icon_confused_144.gif)