Hello everyone, I’m Hawkstar. I’m the guy who’s been going through pretty much every Generation 5 Pokemon analysis for every metagame for typographical errors. Thanks to the wonderful GP volunteers, my searches usually come up with only around one or two minor errors per analysis. However, the errors I do find seem to almost always fall into one of the 4 below-mentioned categories. To that end, I wish to point these out to help stop typos before they reach the site. Here are the 4 most common typos I see, in no particular order except for the em-dashes, which I do indeed see typed incorrectly the most.
1. Em-dashes (—)
The number one issue I’ve noticed in the analyses I read are the butchered em-dashes I see. About 80% of the analyses that have them use them correctly, but don’t type them correctly. The symbol in parenthesis is an em-dash, and many analyses don’t even use the correct symbol once. Those that do sometimes have spaces between it and the surrounding text, which is also wrong. This example, taken straight from the Smogon Spelling and Grammar Standards thread, demonstrates the proper use.
Mareep—that is to say, the entire evolution family—is extremely cute.
Not:
Mareep--that is to say, the entire evolution family--is extremely cute.
or:
Mareep - that is to say, the entire evolution family - is extremely cute.
The alt code to type the em-dash is Alt+0151.
2. Incomplete editing
This one is for those users with SCMS access. Sometimes, when the name of something is removed from an analysis (usually the name of a recently banned Pokemon), it doesn’t affect anything. However, there are a few times where a Pokemon’s name is removed from an analysis, but the context of the sentence that relies on said Pokemon is not changed. For an example:
Rotom-W and Jolteon are all threatening Electric-types in the OU metagame.
The sentence structure here is for a list of three or more items, but there are only two. What most likely happened was that Thundurus was once a member of this list, but got removed when he got banned. This kind of mistake can be avoided by making sure whatever you’re removing isn’t being referred to by something else in the sentence, or possibly in the next sentence.
3. Statistics
When I first started, I began noticing a lot of the statistics in the analyses were wrong. As a rule of thumb, I always double-check any math not done by a damage calculator, unless it looks ridiculous. For example:
Jirachi can utilize the paraflinch strategy, which gives the opponent a paltry 25% chance of moving each turn, allowing Jirachi to slowly kill them with Iron Head.
Paralysis has a 25% chance of activating, while Iron Head has a 60% chance of flinching. To calculate the chance of the opponent being able to move, we multiply the decimal form of the chance that each effect has of
not activating.
.75 * .4 = .3
That should actually be a 30% chance of Jirachi’s opponent not moving. Rather than re-calculating these stats every time, I find it easier to memorize some important chance values, such as the 37.5% chance of parafusion working, the 49% chance of Focus Blast hitting twice, and so on.
4. Homonym confusion
One thing I’ve been seeing recently is homonyms being used in place of each other on accident. Things such as “of” and “off” getting mixed up is making it on-site more and more. For example:
The ubiquity of Stealth Rock hurts Volcarona’s chances of pulling of a sweep.
This is a hard error to catch (especially when “of” is used correctly only two words behind the error), and for those that use spell-checkers to help them when proofreading, most automatic spell-checkers aren’t smart enough to catch that type of error.
