My informal monitoring of the top spelling and punctuation mistakes online show that the number one spot hasn’t changed:
1: “sneak peak” instead of the correct “sneak peek.” I see this one about once a week these days.
Number two also is unchanged:
2: confusion between “complimentary” meaning free (or saying nice things about something) and “complementary” meaning something that augments or is a good match with something else.
But there’s a new number 3, as written in the Circalit newsletter, a surprising place to find it:
3: "fiction novel" - novels are, by definition, works of fiction. There are no non-fiction novels.
Other old favorites include using "me" when it should be "I" and vice-versa. For instance, consider the statement, "Frank and me went to the party together." The easy way to test whether this is correct is to delete the other person: "Me went to the party" obviously doesn't sound right, it would be "I went to the party." "They gave the award to Lisa and I" also is incorrect. You wouldn't say "They gave the award to I" so it would be "They gave the award to Lisa and me."
Feel free to add your candidates—we’re not talking about typos, plenty of which creep into this blog as well, but wrong usage.
