Hi, gang! Well it looks like it’s Hyphen-o-phobia season – with a few other assorted boo-boos thrown into the mix. Won’t you join me (aka the Grammar Cop) in exploring this discombobulation of dreadful deeds?

1. Do you get completely stressed and anxious during the lead up to an awesome vacation? [No, but I do get stressed seeing these grammar glitches!]
2. While family trips and vacations are meant to help you relax and give you a much needed break from everyday life, the time leading up to that trip can be full of worry and mini (or major) freak outs. [More of the same babble, and why not? Same writer!]
3. [It] was the scene for the recent film premiere of “Heading Home” a documentary on the renowned Israeli Baseball Teams first ever time in the World Baseball Classic. [Another argument against having the graphics designer write photo captions!]

And the corrections:

1. A simple insertion of a hyphen between “lead” and “up” will calm my hyperventilation. Whenever lead-up is used as a noun, as it is here (during the lead-up), we need a hyphen. (When it’s a verb, we don’t, as in “We’ll lead up to the parade with some cool baton-twirling first.”)
2. Here we need a hyphen between “much” and “needed”: a much-needed break. (Much-needed is a compound adjective modifying break.) There are two other places in this wretched sentence that also need hyphens. Here’s the entire thing, corrected version: While family trips and vacations are meant to help you relax and give you a much-needed break from everyday life, the time leading up to that trip can be full of worry and mini- (or major) freak-outs. If you’re wondering why the hyphen after mini is there, it’s because mini is actually part of freak-outs: mini-freak-outs. So why doesn’t major need a hyphen after it?  Well, major can stand on its own, whereas mini cannot.
3. Sigh. There are three mistakes in this sentence. See them? The first we come to is a missing comma after “Heading Home.” It goes inside the closing quotation mark, by the way, like this: “Heading Home,” a documentary… (In North America, commas and periods go inside the closing quotation mark. In the UK they go outside.) The second error is the missing apostrophe [apostrophe catastrophe!😅] before the “s” in “Israeli Baseball Teams” – it should say Team’s – the singular possessive. The third mistake is the missing hyphen in “first ever” – it should say first-ever, as it’s a compound adjective modifying “time”: first-ever time.

OK! Here’s a much-deserved time-out for all of you, since you’ve been paying major attention to this mini-lesson. Have a lovely, safe week!