This is a bit of a rant, by the way.

So recently I came across this:

I'm going to start off by being nice: I'm glad you're enjoying the story.  And also, thank you for being nice about the way the criticism was constructed, with a balanced positive and negative.

But I won't lie.  This caused me a good laugh.  And since this is on an anonymous confessions blog (and therefore publically visible) and the poster of it didn't contact me personally or leave a comment with a polite "hey, by the way, I've noticed you have a consistent spelling error: you always spell 'defense' with a 'c'", to which I would have replied with an equally polite "oh, that's just UK English – that's the way we spell it here", I think it's fair game in reponse to which I can post an equally public response, because I'm really not into replying to posts on affconfessions as it distorts the whole purpose of it being a confessions blog by turning it into a reply fest.  It'll be interesting to see if anybody else just finds it plain ignorant and points it out; if they do, that's up to them – I mean, there are a lot of people in the world who use UK English or can at least recognise it, including the admin who posted the confession with a tag saying that it was a British thing.  I'm not going to get involved on there.  But anyway, mistakes are lessons learnt if corrected and then they'll hopefully never happen again.  I didn't think this merited posting a whole new chapter of TBBC to reply, so I'm just going to link this blog post when the next chapter goes up.  I mean, this is the kind of thing that I prefer to respond to person-to-person, but if you go posting it on a confessions blog, it's actually not possible to do that, and therefore being very public about it is the only way for me to respond.  It's the same contacting the mods at the moment: if you have an issue with something that you can't for some reason report, the only way to get hold of the mods is to be very public about your issue and to hope that they'll respond.

Okay.  First of all, here's a very quick lesson on some aspects of the differences between UK and US English.

1)  Commonly, nouns in US English that end "-ense" which come from Latin roots will end "-ence" in UK English.  Examples: offense/offence, defense/defence.  This is not, however, the case for all such nouns: "response" is from the same Latin language family and yet we spell that with an "s" in the UK.

2) In almost all cases, nouns in US English that end "-or" which come from Latinate roots will end "-our" in UK English.  This is due to the influence of French.  Examples: color/colour, labor/labour.  There are probably exceptions, but I can't think of any off the top of my head.

3) Nouns in US English, or rather, base roots of verbs (which often look identical to the nouns that they are taken from), that end "e+consonant" will usually double that final consonant in UK English before adding suffixes that begin with an "e" or an "i" – this is usually only the case with "l", I think, as most of the time US English also doubles the consonant (e.g. chop -> chopped) to keep the preceding vowel short.  These suffixes are basically "-ed" (to form the past), "-ing" to form the present participle, and "-er" to form the agent noun extracted from the noun/verb.  E.g. Travel -> travelled, traveller, travelling vs traveled, traveler, traveling.  Interestingly enough, it is apparently correct – though not common – to double the "l" in US English if you so wish.  But in UK English, it is incorrect not to double the consonant.

4) Many verbs in US English that end with "-ize", and their corresponding abstract nouns ("-ization") can be spelt "-ise" and "-isation" in UK English.  Actually, in UK English, we have the choice to do it with either the "s" or the "z".  E.g. realise, realisation vs realize, realization.  Similarly with "-yze/-yse", though "-yze" is not recognised in UK English.  In fact, the "-ize" spelling in the UK is actually not as common as "-ise".  It's known as the Oxford spelling, because it's used by the OUP and the OED (which recognises the "-ise" spelling).

5) Nouns in US English that end "-er" and are usually etymologically related to Latin, Greek or the Romance languages will be spelt "-re" in UK English.  E.g. center/centre, meter/metre.

6) Nouns in UK English that end with an "og" sound, though are spelt "-ogue" (I think due to French influence?) are spelt "-og" in the US.  E.g. dialogue/dialog.

7) The "ae/oe" combination you see in UK English, which usually results from words that are derived from Greek, usually drop the "a" or the "o" in US English.  E.g. archaeology/archeology, oestrogen/estrogen.

Basically, if you want to read up quickly on spelling differences between UK and US English, here's a wikipedia page on it that's very comprehensive.  One last thing: in the US, "practice" is both a noun and a verb.  In the UK "practice" is the noun and "practise" is the verb.  There are also vocabulary differences that are worth looking into - pavement, rubber, jumper, purse being examples from the top of my head.

I'm not going to go into grammar beyond saying that in UK English, commas and full stops are only included in quotation marks if they're part of the quotation, whereas they are by default in the US.  However, in both UK and US English, the question mark will come outside quotation marks if what is quoted is not a question but the rest of the sentence is.  E.g. what does she mean, "the question mark will come outside quotation marks"?  Examples of the UK practice for commas and full stops and quotation marks are sprinkled all throughout this blog post.

***Edited***

So, there was a much longer rant here, which went a bit overboard.  I've taken it away, because I don't want the poster to feel I hate them or anything, because I don't.  To the OP, if you did read that, then I'm sorry.

But I do just want to re-emphasise two points that I've already made in various a/ns:

1) Check your facts before flinging opinions all over the place, especially on the internet.  If your facts are incorrect, then you're only going to make yourself look like a fool.  It's not worth it.

2) If you think that something about a story is not up to par, whether it's spelling, grammar, pacing, plot or even layout, then the correct and only person you go to about it is the author, and therefore the only places you should be posting that are in the comments section, on their wall, or via PM, or other direct forms of communication, such as their personal twitter account.  I have an ask.fm so people can do that anonymously if they so wish.  You are going to do yourself no favours in life if you can't confront a problem by yourself and if you don't train yourself to have the courage to confront people about issues that you have with them.  If your default, when you have an issue with somebody and want them to change, is to hide behind somebody else and get them to mediate, or worse, to hide behind somebody else, get them to mediate, and then also be loud about the fact that you have an issue with somebody without personally telling that person you have an issue, then you're going to have a very tough time solving problems and people are also going to lose their respect for you incredibly quickly.  Quite apart from learning how to solve issues yourself, it's really rude to go behind somebody else's back and then blast out to the whole world that you have an issue with them, particularly if you have the means and ability to do it more personally without getting other people involved.

To finish up, US English is not superior to UK English, just as UK English is not superior to US English.  If somebody is using a correct form of English that is not the same as the dialect of English that you use, it's rude to expect them to conform to your version just because you haven't been bothered to educate yourself.