Insta-Poll: Is The Bedeviling In The Details?

What are the most common errors you see when line-editing manuscripts?

I've been a copy editor for the last 10 of my 23 years in newspapering, and recently I've been keeping loose track of the kinds of errors I spot in the news copy I read five nights a week. Tell us how often these kind of mistakes pop up in your own red-pen adventures.

In no particular order (and leaving out typos because spellcheck usually identifies those, and often they're mistakes of speed-typing rather than deliberate ignorance):

Sentence-Smoosh Syndrome. Example: "The sergeant, who found the car to be stolen, attempted to pull it over, but the man refused to stop, and a pursuit began, going down Auto Center Way, onto Kitsap Way, and eventually to Chico Way." I realize that in fiction, long sentences can convey a certain intense dramatic flow or sense of unrelenting action. But it takes a high degree of skill to keep from losing a reader by cramming too many thoughts into one cerebral bite. Too much of this bite is certain to spill down the reader's cerebral shirt.

Proper-Noun Pinches. This may be a pet peeve more than an objective rule, but I believe that phrasing like "Joe Friday met with county commissioners" when you mean to convey "Joe met Friday with county commissioners" is clearly the enemy of clarity.

Homonym Homicides. I can't tell you how many otherwise intelligent writers say things like "she acted on principal" when they obviously meant "principle." Or mistaking "affect" for "effect," or being painfully perplexed when picking among "peak," "peek" and "pique." To my mind, anybody who purports to practice the writing art ought to have mastered this piece of craft in their formative years. But it continues to be an enduring weakness for many professional writers who turn in otherwise clean copy.

Tense Tangles. This often goes hand in hand with overstuffed sentences. A typical meandering journey might see a writer start with past tense, take a left turn at the comma down Past Perfect Place, hang a U-ie at Conditional Corner and run a stop sign at Simple Present Street. And I'm not being a snob here: Even I struggle to this day with "lay" vs. 'lie." Really. I cannot tell a lay.

Hyphen Hellspawning. Some of these are errors and some are subjectively interpreted, and I come from the school of thought that sees hyphens as reading speed bumps except where clarity is directly threatened (and this has been the toughest part of my ongoing transition from an Associated Press style mindset to a Chicago Manual one). As such, I try to insert them only when necessary, or to ensure consistency (inconsistency, I find, is the hobgoblin of deadline-writing minds). Then again, sometimes a mistake is a mistake, and constructions such as "I met her six-weeks-ago" and "one of a kind human being" can't be bloodied enough with the tip of one's red pen.

So, what common errors do you run across in your own work? And how do you distinguish between errors and peeves?
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By our new contributor, Jim Thomsen, who hasn't found a good picture or bio yet. :)