Common errors
The mode's errors divide the way the numeral pamphlet's did: mistakes the mode's own rules forbid outright, and habits a script with vowel carriers would need that this one does not, carried over out of caution, not necessity. A wrong tengwa cannot be shown the way a wrong sentence can; each example below renders the correct form directly, so these are read by checking your own hand against it, not by comparing a starred form to a fixed one.
Error 1: Reaching for a carrier that was never needed
The habit comes from classical modes, where a word beginning on a vowel needs a bare carrier tengwa to hold it. Phi never has that word (every word opens on a consonant), so the hand that reaches for a carrier anyway is solving a problem this language does not have.
mia melu thumela. 1SG friend teach. (I teach a friend.)
melu opens on malta with its own vowel already riding above it. Nothing precedes malta. The rendered line above shows it plainly: there is no carrier because there was never a gap for one to fill.
Error 2: Above and below, swapped
A hiatus pair read bottom-first says the syllables in the wrong order: not a garbled word, a different one. The rule from chapter 4 has no exception: above is the vowel that follows the consonant directly, below is the vowel that follows in hiatus, and the order never reverses no matter how the two marks happen to sit on the page.
mia thia lothea. 1SG 2SG love. (I love you.)
Thúlë here carries e above and a below. Read it above-then-below and it says the·a, the second and third syllables of lothea. Read it below-then-above and it says nothing in Phi at all.
Error 3: Choosing rómen or órë by ear
Chapter 5's rule is positional, not acoustic. A word-initial r is rómen even from a speaker who taps it; a word-internal r is órë even from a speaker who trills it. Writing by ear guesses at a sound the reader was never going to hear anyway: Tengwar is silent, and the position was always the only information it had to give.
mia roela theo. 1SG scroll read. (I read a scroll.)
roela's r opens the word. It is rómen regardless of how the sentence sounds read aloud.
Error 4: Plain silmë where nuquerna belongs
Plain silmë is real (a calligrapher's option, never wrong to know), but every Phi s carries a tehta, because every Phi syllable is open, and nuquerna is the shape built to hold one without crowding. Writing plain silmë in running Phi text is not a style choice; the mode's own ruling settles it, throughout, not sometimes.
silero maeli nai. star quiet be. (The star is quiet.)
silero opens on silmë nuquerna carrying i above. Any other Phi s in this pamphlet carries a tehta the same way. Check one against another and the shape never changes.
Error 5: A digraph split into two tengwar
ph, th, sh, and wh are two letters in romanization and one sound in speech, so they are one tengwa in Tengwar: formen, thúlë, harma, hwesta. Writing them as two separate tengwar draws a consonant cluster Phi's phonology does not allow, for a sound Phi's phonology treats as single.
mia phelui shonela. 1SG word learn. (I learn a word.)
phelui opens on formen alone. One tengwa, one sound, exactly as the romanization's two letters always meant.
Error 6: A mark Phi's mode never carries
Commas, question marks, quotation marks: English gives each its own silent glyph, and the instinct to reach for a Phi equivalent is natural. Phi does not have one, in any mode. The comma of address is kona, the question mark is wa, the quotation marks are shola and sholo: words, spoken aloud, written exactly like any other word. Only sentence-end has no word standing at it, which is why the period is the only silent mark the mode carries at all.
The one that is not a mistake in the hand
A seventh habit is worth naming, and it has no wrong example, because it is not a mistake in how anyone writes. It is watching someone else's hand form a shape a half-stroke differently and deciding they have it wrong. The mode rules this pamphlet teaches settle what a mark must mean, never how narrowly a hand must shape it to mean it: a wider bow, a straighter stem, a shallower curve are a hand's own signature, not an error waiting to be corrected. Pen and ink will always have the last word over a rendered page. Judge a stroke by whether the reader can still tell which tengwa it is. Nothing finer than that was ever the mode's business.