To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive

Hey, it's Friday in over half the world by now, even if we still have an hour to go in the Central timezone. I made up five questions in a fit of pique at reading way too many fics in a row that had gobs of grammatical errors, so if this sounds bitchy, that would be why. ;)

Friday Five for Grammar Whores and Disgruntled Fic-Readers

1. What punctuation mistake bothers you the most?

Probably when people don't use commas to separate introductory elements, interjections, addresses, etc. (Ex. "How are you today, Sam?"/"Well, sir, I'm just fine.") That bothers me all out of proportion to the seriousness of the error. A close second is misuse of apostrophes--its vs it's, possessives where inappropriate ("Orange's 10 cents!"), etc.

2. Which is worse: a run-on sentence or a sentence fragment?

Both annoy the hell out of me, but run-ons can also make it difficult to figure out what's going on, so I'll go with them. Commas and semicolons are your friends! Really, they are! (Fragments, while they piss me off, aren't usually confusing, except that I'm confused as to how someone can overlook a blatantly dependent clause that's hanging off on its own...)

3. Which pair/triad of synonyms or homonyms (i.e. there/their/they're, here/hear, etc.) annoys you the most when mixed up?

Probably your/you're. Good lord, people, those two words are used so frequently, and it's so easy to fix...

4. What grammar or usage error makes you hit the "back" button faster than anything?

If I see careless errors in the first paragraph, such as mixed tenses or spelling errors that should've been caught with a spellchecker. That tells me the author doesn't care about their work, and so neither should I. Not starting a new paragraph when someone new speaks is a close second. That makes it damn near impossible to read.

5. If there were one piece of punctuation or one grammatical rule you would like to introduce to fic more than anything else, what would it be?

The world needs more semicolons. I like them. They're useful in correcting the run-on sentences mentioned above, and a nice way to keep sentences from being too short and choppy without having a lot of dependent clauses.

[ETA: Of course, I have read fic that was wonderful even when it included many of the errors mentioned above, but sometimes it just gets frustrating, y'know? Especially to a person like me, who takes red pens to printed books because there's always at least one typo, and it bothers the hell out of me. *ahem* Yes, I am going to be an editor when I grow up, why do you ask? ;)]