Round up the Usual Subjects

Life has kept me busy lately, which is why my last post was over a month ago. Editing work and requests for manuscript evaluations are pouring in quite steadily, and my schedule of teaching/speaking gigs is filling up.
And then there's the boatyard saga. Suffice to say, the new engine is installed (though not hooked up or operable), the new thru-hulls are in, the new rigging's up, and the newly painted mast looks great. However, we have yet to tackle the usual boatyard subjects—painting and repairing the old girl's bottom and sides.
Today, though, I'm back at my desk, editing and sighing (repeatedly). I certainly get tired of correcting the same old errors, day in and day out. I won't bore you with clever tirades about missing commas (though you can find a good one here), or go on about obscure punctuation rules, because today I am talking about basics. Spelling.
There are certain words that almost every author I've ever worked with has misspelled once or twice in their manuscripts; these misused and abused words crop up in the work of the aspiring and the (nearly) expiring author. And there's a very good reason why: they are homophones—words that sound just like the word you meant to type‚ so they won't be corrected by spellchecker software, or easily caught by reading your work aloud.
Wikipedia has a long list of these commonly misspelled homophones here.
For today, I'm going to limit myself to three sets of misspelled words:
Peak, peek, and pique
Poor, pore, and pour
Teem and team
These seem to occur in my clients' work more than any others—perhaps because they sound so darn good, whether they are spelled correctly or not!
I suggest you search for these in your manuscript and see whether you've used them correctly. Peek means to look furtively; a peak is a mountaintop or metaphorical height; and pique is a feeling. You don't "pour" over documents, you pore over them, poor you...so pour yourself a drink! And there's no "i" in team, but there is an "a," though the teeming masses in the stadium might not know how to spell either one correctly.
That's my rant for the day—now, back to work...
hasta pronto!