Pet Peeve #1 - That vs Who
by JM
This is a mistake that I think is just one of those things that will never change. I see/hear it in music lyrics, in spoken words, even in the newspaper.
When you’re talking about a person, he or she is the person who said or did something. He or she is not the person that said or did something.
That is my biggest pet peeve of all time, and I’m fully aware I’m guilty of it at times. 
Unfortunately, the way you check for this is using “Find” on your word processor (Ctrl+F for Windows) and finding every “that” you have used. The job may be tedious, but it’s definitely worth it in the end. Your work will sound much better if you talk about the people who do things instead of the people that do things.
Rant over. 
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December 10th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Also, “that” is a very superfluous word, and can be edited out of most sentences. For example, I’m doing Miss Snark’s crapometer later this week. (crapometeriv.blogspot.com & misssnark.blogspot.com) For that, I get 250 words to make my hook, and when you’re given that kind of word limit, you start to see where the superfluous words are, because there’s just no space for them.
December 13th, 2006 at 5:37 am
Exactly! That’s one of the first things I learned about editing. I read to, first off, use the find and replace function to find out just how many times you use “that.” Doing it certainly got me to start being a bit more careful!
Thanks for the links. You’ll have to tell me how you do.