Three Big Mistakes

It is now accepted practice for businesses to use social media for marketing purposes, it’s all part of getting your presence out there and networking effectively. However, if your tweets, updates or blog posts contain basic grammatical errors, it might not give the image that you’re hoping for.

The first rule is always proofread it before you post it, even if it’s only a short tweet. Better still, if you can, get someone else to read it for you before putting it out to the world at large, as you won’t always see your own mistakes. This is particularly important if it’s something like your business webpage.

There are three mistakes that I come across on an almost daily basis. These are the ones to watch for when you’re writing.

There/their/they’re
Three words, three meanings one sound, but NOT interchangeable!
There tells you where. It’s over there. To remember it think about here/where/there which all have the same ending.
Their means it belongs to them. It’s their money. To remember it think about if it’s theirs then it will belong to their heirs!
They’re means they are. They’re not parting with their money. Easy one to remember as all you’ve done is taken the letter a out.

Your/you’re
Your means belonging to you; you’re is short for you are.
The usual mistake here is to use your instead of you’re, for example, your completely mistaken. Well yes, you are if you write it like that. To remember it, just think about what you are (you’re) saying.

Apostrophes in plurals
Simple rule – there are NO apostrophes in plurals! You don’t have lots of blog post’s or tweet’s. The apostrophe is only used to show a missing letter (see above) or possession e.g. Maggie’s blog.

So those are the most common mistakes but there are plenty of other pitfalls out there. A few to look out for:

Of/off
Of is a preposition with lots of different uses; off is the opposite of on.
When I see this mistake, I like to think that it’s a typing error and someone’s finger slipped off of the f key.

Where/wear
Where tells you the position of something; wear is what you do with your clothes.
Where are you going that you have to wear such an outrageous outfit?

Bear/bare
Bear means to carry (or also a big brown animal); bare means naked.
I’ll bear with you, but I really don’t think I know you well enough to bare with you.

Here/hear
Here tells you where it is; hear is what you do with your ear. That’s how you remember it – if there’s no ‘ear’ in the word then there’s no ear involved in the action!
Can you hear it if you stand here?

Affect/effect
This is an interesting one because affect is the verb, what you do, and effect is the noun so they are very easy to mix up. If you affect someone then you will have an effect on them.

Practise/practice
Another noun/verb one to confuse you. Practise is the verb, practice is the noun. It is good practice to practise writing correctly. I’m open to suggestions on how to remember these last two easily!

So, which words do you have to think twice about before using?

Eggcorns

What’s an eggcorn? You know – it’s one of those things that grows into an oak tree…

Actually, this is just an example of an eggcorn, the substitution of a similar sounding word for the correct word. Often the substituted word will make more sense to the speaker which is why they will use it. A classic example is the use of Old Timers’ Disease for Alzheimer’s Disease.

Although no doubt this practice has gone on for centuries and is probably the reason behind some of the subtle shifts of language over time, only recently has it been given a name. The word eggcorn was coined in 2003 by the linguist Geoffrey Pullum, which is why you won’t find it in many dictionaries – yet.

I often come across eggcorns during the course of transcribing interviews. One of the most common is when someone says that they did something off of their own back. The correct phrase is off one’s own bat, meaning to do something without being told, but you can see where the confusion arises – what on earth has a bat got to do with showing a bit of initiative? Alternatively, as seen on a website recently: We need our laws to be more restrict. Hmm, do we need them to be more strict or more restrictive?

Sometimes eggcorns can be amusing or inadvertently descriptive. However, when they creep into basic grammar, it can just give the impression that you or your staff or whoever is responsible for writing a particular piece isn’t the sharpest tool in the box. If you’ve written something that is important, especially if it’s going to go out to the general public or to customers, then it’s always worth proof-reading it. Poor grammar reflects badly on your business image. I leave you with this example from my local swimming pool to show what I mean:

Please note that we have changed the times of are family swim sessions.

If this sort of thing interests you, you might like to check out Michael Quinion’s excellent site World Wide Words, or the Language Log blog.