Blogging, Teaching and Grammar mistakes

Recently I’ve been writing more than usual, at work I have to write reports daily and in the evening when I’m bored I sometimes write for leisure, but I’ve never really paid that much attention to my grammar and never really had to. That is until I became interested in becoming an English teacher and doing a TEFL course in Thailand, now I’m paying a lot more attention to my ‘oh so often’ mistakes.

I’ve noticed after re-reading many of my recent articles I am making the same grammatical mistakes and if I intend to teach English I think I should correct these before I start. Now I’ll never turn into a grammar Nazi, I just don’t have the grammatical knowledge to compete with some people, but these next 4 mistakes are mistakes I make over and over again and should be easy to stop.

These next four problems are what the linguists call Homophone errors and the grammar Nazis call them ‘Are you a retard?’ problems.   Homophone errors occur due to the nature of the word being written, when these written words are spoken, they can sound the same as another word but actually have another meaning. So when you are writing, often you are typing the dialogue going through your head as quick as possible, these mistakes listed below are the most common made.

I’ve included a nice little graphic from Wiki to confuse you!

1. Its and It’s

Its is the possessive pronoun; it modifies a noun

It’s is a Contraction of ‘it is’ or ‘it has’

I make this mistake all the time, but I have learnt a little trick. Replace the word with ‘It is’ or ‘It has’ and if it sounds stupid then your best to go with Its.

2.Your and You’re

Your is the second person possessive adjective

ex. What is your frickn’ problem?

You’re is the contraction of ‘you are’

ex. What the f**k do you think you’re doing?

Simple rule, always replace the word with ‘you are’ if it sounds right your right you’re. If not always stick with your.

3. There, Their and They’re

Shouldn’t still be making this mistake after all these years, may Dad would kill me if he knew!

There has several different meanings, noun, adjective, pronoun and adverb which can get pretty confusing but an easy way to remember is to point when saying it aloud, if it fits then it should work on paper. Like ‘look over there‘ – ‘There is weird shit happening!‘

Their is the third person plural possessive adjective – like ‘Is that shit theirs?‘

Tip: You never ‘ever ever’ put an apostrophe in theirs, NEVER!

They’re is the contraction of ‘they are’ – like ‘they’re bonkers!’

Easy right??? just very very boring…

4. Affect & Effect

This still confuses me daily at work and often have to ask the office, to which I mostly get a bunch of blank faces. Its pretty simple really, Affect is a verb and Effect is a Noun. A simple rule is to put ‘the‘ in front of the word to clarify which one you need as you can not put ‘the’ in front of a verb. i.e. ‘the effect’

For example you could write in the comments:

‘Your blog post is affecting my sanity’

or

‘My madness is the effect of reading your bloody grammar post!”

So that is it, my first and most likely last grammar post. These little mistakes are simple to change and can improve your writing, teaching and most recently my blog posts.

Please correct me if I’m wrong on any of the above.