These are all the things I would have picked out - except I would just drop 'would', not replace with it 'will'. (The verb then becoming 'do', later in the sentence.)
I'd also add that in changing any of those I could easily be proof-reading a native speaker's writing.
With the exception of:
if you spot out anything
unless it's an AmE idiom or something, to me that's the only think that marks you out as non-native. I'm aware I've said both 'picked out' and 'marks you out', and I have no idea how to explain why this is different, it just sounds weird.
AmE speaker here. I have never heard anyone use "spot out" as a verb, but on the other hand, prepositions seem to pretty frequently attach themselves to new verbs or drop from common phrases. It still bugs me a little to hear colleagues talking about "building out" a new feature instead of simply building it, for example.
That is a weird one, yes. I think it comes from 'flesh out', which, if similar, is at least old enough that it doesn't sound strange to me.
Wiktionary sort of suggests it should sound similarly odd - it doesn't discuss it on the flesh out page [0], but for flesh vb. [1] it does give '5. To put flesh on; to fatten'.
Comments
These are all the things I would have picked out - except I would just drop 'would', not replace with it 'will'. (The verb then becoming 'do', later in the sentence.)
I'd also add that in changing any of those I could easily be proof-reading a native speaker's writing.
With the exception of:
unless it's an AmE idiom or something, to me that's the only think that marks you out as non-native. I'm aware I've said both 'picked out' and 'marks you out', and I have no idea how to explain why this is different, it just sounds weird.
AmE speaker here. I have never heard anyone use "spot out" as a verb, but on the other hand, prepositions seem to pretty frequently attach themselves to new verbs or drop from common phrases. It still bugs me a little to hear colleagues talking about "building out" a new feature instead of simply building it, for example.
That is a weird one, yes. I think it comes from 'flesh out', which, if similar, is at least old enough that it doesn't sound strange to me.
Wiktionary sort of suggests it should sound similarly odd - it doesn't discuss it on the flesh out page [0], but for flesh vb. [1] it does give '5. To put flesh on; to fatten'.
[0] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flesh_out#Verb
[1] - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flesh#Verb