I endeavor to do my best when writing publicly. I believe it is important to be as correct as I can when I express myself to reduce confusion and misinterpretation. Sometimes misunderstandings happen, but that is more likely because of the content of the message itself not so much how it was written. People are masters of deliberately misconstruing words, but I digress.
As a self-proclaimed grammar geek, a student of the English language for life, an ambassador, I love the nuances and the complexities of what we call “American English”. Sometimes I like the usage and spelling of the British version. Of course, I am not perfect when I write or speak, and I do not think that anyone whether English is your native language or not will ever be perfect.
I love learning what I don’t know about. I appreciate correction when I am wrong about usage or punctuation especially, as these are weaknesses for me. I’ll struggle with where to put commas or how long a sentence should be when I write because I can go on and on about it. Many people do this but some don’t care about silly things like using a period to separate conclusive and complete thoughts, lol. It’s annoying. So I’m constantly rewriting and rearranging words or exchanging words when I write. For instance, this post is probably going to go through several revisions before it’s published and I still may not think it’s perfect afterward. I’ll use the thesaurus, the dictionary, and Grammarly to help me. Then I think, “oh well, it’s a blog and it doesn’t have to be perfect, lol”.
One of my grievances with how people in America butcher the English language is shorthand. There is so much slang and text writ that we tend to carry those shorthand types into the professional or public arenas where it is not appropriate. Unless you’ve been living under a rock in a tunnel deep in the center of the earth, then I am sure you’ve seen the social media or blog posts that try to teach the lesser-learned about the woes of the most common grammatical errors. I’ll list a few so you can recognize them when you see them.
- They’re vs. Their vs. There
- Your vs. You’re
- Its vs. It’s
- Passive Voice
- Referring to a Brand or Entity as ‘They’
- Possessive Nouns
- Affect vs. Effect
- Me vs. I
- To vs. Too
- Do’s and Don’ts
- Who vs. That
- Who vs. Whom vs. Whose vs. Who’s
- Alot vs. A lot vs. Allot
- Into vs. In to
- Lose vs. Loose
- Then vs. Than
- Of vs. Have
- Use of Commas
- Assure vs. Insure vs. Ensure
- Less vs. Fewer
- Semicolons
- Compliment vs. Complement
- Farther vs. Further
- Title Capitalization
- Between vs. Among
I should probably expand on each of these in a series. I think that would help us all learn what the errors are and how to correct them. Any practice is good, right?
It would be great is to write about my experiences with correcting people who make blatant, gross, irresponsible, and careless errors. For me, I have no trouble correcting people who do this because I would want to be corrected if I am out here trampling the language. Sometimes, we just don’t know better, but more likely people don’t care to find out how to correctly do a thing.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the grammar series. I hope the list above helps you. Thank you for joining me. See you next time.
ronecole 