Editing Tip of the Day: Think

English is a strange language, no doubt, and it continues to evolve. But sometimes, people forget that even with all its irregularities and rule-defying spellings, on a sentence level, English still makes sense.
What does that mean? Well, when someone uses a figure of speech or a common saying, the sentence should still make sense. But people make mistakes with these sayings fairly often, especially when they've never seen them written down.
You can usually avoid this common pitfall in your writing if you stop and ask yourself: does this saying make sense?
Here are some examples of common mistakes we see:
WRONG: a Chester drawers
RIGHT: a chest of drawers
(While the usage of chest here as a piece of furniture, like a toy box, is a bit old-fashioned, a "Chester drawers" makes no sense.)
WRONG: I would of come
RIGHT: I would have come
("Of" may be how many people pronounce this, but it doesn't make sense if we stop and think about it, right? And perfect past-tense verbs take had/have as helper verbs.)
WRONG: I could care less
RIGHT: I couldn't care less
(This one I have to stop and think about every time, because it's so commonly misused. If I could care less about something, then that logically means I DO care about it. If it doesn't matter to me, then I could not care any less about it than I currently do.)
WRONG: I defiantly agree
RIGHT: I definitely agree
(Defiance generally indicates opposition to something, so while I can agree with someone and have an attitude about it, I can't really defy them while still agreeing with them.)
WRONG: Peek/Peak my interest
RIGHT: Pique my interest
(This is a vocab mistake we see fairly often. Pique just isn't used often enough in English, outside of this particular phrase, for it to be familiar. But if we think about it, neither "peek" nor "peak" make sense. Sneaky look my interest? High point (of something) my interest? Both choices are plainly nonsense.)

There are many more examples we could go over, but let's cover solutions to this particular editing problem instead.
Step one is to think it through and see if the phrase or figure of speech makes sense.
Step two, if the phrase doesn't seem to make sense the way you've written it, is to look it up. Ask a friend, ask an editor or writer you know, throw it out on social media as a question (because chances are if you're making one of these mistakes, other people are too--it's pretty common, and nothing to be that embarrassed about). Or check it out on your search engine of choice. Googling "sayings people get wrong" brought me up pages of results with lists of all the sayings people tend to misspell.
Number one piece of advice, for this and any other editing problem? Never be afraid to ask for help​. We've all been there.