Well, that’s the first one obviously: rogue apostrophes. Let’s leave that one there because I do it a lot myself, but if I don’t pick it up on the read through, my editor grabs it during a review.
The next one is a minor point that many are guilty of, including me. It’s the increasingly common ‘trailing off’ dialogue:
‘But Marion, we can’t just…’
Okay, I don’t have a problem with that, except that it’s often accompanied by a dialogue tag:
‘But Marion, we can’t just…,’ his voice trailed off.
I know, there’s nothing technically wrong with it, but every time I see it I think, Why did you say ‘his voice trailed off’? I know his ‘voice trailed off’; the three dots at the end of the dialogue are telling me his ‘voice trailed off’.
A minor point, sure, but I always feel that good writing gets the message across with as little extra fluff as possible.