Coincidentally, it feels like you’re having your head ripped off when your editor tells you that, in fact, your writing and knowledge of the English language leaves a lot to be desired…

The pain of it!

But here is the truth: editors are doing you a huge favour when they point these things out; and believe it or not, they don’t do this because it is enormously satisfying, they do it because it’s what they are there to do! “What do they know?”you might say, after a particularly ferocious writer / editor encounter that has left you running for the safety of a dark room and sobbing into hand towels. Well, as it turns out, they know one hell of a lot: a lot more than you do and will probably ever be able to learn. They spend their life righting peoples wrongs and making sure that manuscripts and articles are fit and ready for publication. And don’t forget, nobody gets in more trouble than an editor when a piece is not grammatically sound. So when they tell you that you have things to learn, don’t take it personally and break out in to some everyones-against-the-poor-writer speech, thank them. They are doing you a favour if you ever intend to sell your work. Without editors, we’d all be in a lot of trouble and likely never sell anything!

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THE GREENGROCER’S APOSTROPHE

Perhaps the most well-known and widespread error, the erroneous apostrophe before the S on plurals has been made famous by greengrocers offering ’carrot’s'and ’apple’s’. Now worryingly prevalent, it is a misuse of the suffix for possession. A sign saying ’carrot’s £1'should point to a pound being held by a carrot. Point this out to your local veg man. He will thank you.

IT’S ITS

I have little sympathy for most mistakes, but this is a tricky one. Its denotes possession, breaking the very rule set out in point 1. The apostrophe indicates a missing letter - the I in it is. The apostrophe appears to offer little to the budding linguist than confusion and embarrassment. Speaking of which…

YOUR & THEIR

A whole new minefield here, as your (belonging to you), their (belonging to them), you’re, they’re (you are and they are) and there (nothing to do with any of the above) collide to cause maximum confusion. The phrase ’you’re over there'has to date been mispelt in about 100 different ways.

ALOT

An odd one this: ’a'in front of a noun is pretty much universally recognised as signifying one of said item. When it comes to ’a lot'however, the rule is broken, well, a lot. Ignoring the space, the two words become one - and alot has become a widespread error, even spreading to album titles.

AND FINALLY!!!

Not a common misconception, nor a misunderstanding of a confusing grammatical rule - this one’s just plain annoying. The increasing proliferation of exclamation marks is a by-product of electronic communication, and has rendered the humble ! a coda to sentences that simply don’t need them. Anyway, that’s enough from me - I’m off for my dinner!!!!!

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But that’s unlikely to happen, of course, at least any time soon. So it looks like we are just going to have to suffer with these people for now… You may well find yourself thinking that I am going a bit overboard now. That grammar isn’t THAT important. But here’s the thing: employers care about spelling and grammar, and not doing well in a test like this could indeed mean you not getting the job you always wanted. Grammar is more than just a few rules, you see – it’s the staple of communication that, if messed with, can really screw up a lot of things. Like how we interact, how we convey our emotions, and a number of other things. So, you see, it really is IMPORTANT!

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Punctuation is an integral part of writing English text. Regardless of the flavour of writing, it is always important to have a careful look at the usage of your punctuation (commas, periods, ellipses, and semicolons etc.) before you finalize your write-up. The punctuation mistakes are quite common and often, are too small to be ignored while you are writing. Unfortunately, it’s not so when you are read; an incorrectly placed comma can change the entire meaning of the text or a wrong usage of period can make you look stupid.

Following are few tips to avoid some of the common mistakes using punctuations:

Use of commas and periods while quoting a statement

Place the comma or period before the closing quotation mark because it will represent a completion or conjunction of a statement that was quoted.

Examples of correct usage:

• I said, “There is no reason for you to think of me otherwise.”

• “There is no reason for you to think of me otherwise,” I said.

Use of semicolons and colons while quoting a statement

Place the semicolons and colons either after closing quotation mark or before opening quotation mark because they are generally not the part of quoted statement.

Examples of correct usage:

• I said, “The amount of detail you are giving on Macrolane is too much”; he kept going on, nevertheless.

• The president made the following statement: “All the ministers are advised to not make their funding statements publicly available without an official approval from none other than me.”

Use of comma while adding extra information about the subject

Place a comma after the subject and after the phrase containing extra information about the subject. In the following example, ‘one of the former American presidents’ is the phrase with extra information about the subject.

Example of correct usage:

• John Kennedy, one of the former American presidents, made several visits to our country in his efforts to establish business relationships with our people.

There are many other places where punctuation is used incorrectly by a majority of people. However, the golden rule for good and effective writing is to sit deep into the reader’s mind and try to hear in your mind, how your sentences sound to a reader. This applies to virtually all the situations where you are confused over a particular usage of the language.

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What confused me was this: our teacher, Mrs Eggington (nickname: Eggers McSmeggers, which I still think holds up) used to go on about how writing was an art form. This confused me a great deal. Surely if it was an art form then there were no rules to speak of? Surely if it was an art form then we could do whatever we wanted and nobody could tell us any different?

And it gets even more confusing when you look to professional writers for advice and guidance. Many of them break or bend the rules, and unless you truly understand grammar then you are unlikely to understand why they can get away with it. For example, Cormac McCarthy’s apocalyptic thriller has practically no punctuation to speak of, while other author’s don’t even use double quotation marks (instead favouring an em dash) to punctuate speech! Not to mention, it has been ages since I have seen marketing banner stands without grammatical errors.

In my opinion, more fun needs to be injected in to English at schools. Not only that, teachers need to point out just how crucial spelling and punctuation is, and let it be known that you can’t break or bend the rules until you understand each and every one of them.

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Take writing for example. I’d been doing that forever too! I’d never had a big misunderstanding because of words I’d written on a page, so where was the need to start making every sentence perfect and all punctuation ace?

I couldn’t get my head around any of it. If the cave painters of eons past hadn’t bothered, why did our generation have to change the rules?

Then, one day, my teacher – Ms. Barnnaples I believe she was called, and she was a very old woman, all of twenty-nine terrible years of age – took me to one side and said “Jacob, we need to talk about your spelling and grammar and unique use of punctuation.”

By unique she meant shocking, of course.

Ms. Barnnaples then went on a wild and wicked rampage. A rampage of technical wisdom that left no grammatical beast of mine alive and able to continue being used. Not to mention that not even the best excavators could dig up a reasoning to my use of the semicolon. By the end of that conversation (followed by a stern talking to from the Headmaster about why full-stops were a necessary evil) I was beginning to catch her drift: If I was going to get along in this world without alienating every single person I came in to contact with, I was going to have to work within the same rigid grammatical parameters as everyone else.

Which was a pain.

But slowly it happened. Over time grammar became less my enemy and more my friend. It was a nasty, sometimes harsh and belittling friend, granted, but it was also an educational friend. And, indeed, a friend for life.

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Pay attention you! Didn’t you spot the mistake already? It should have been ‘Like the birds’ idea of a good time–’ of course. Seriously, come on, let’s not muck about! If we’re going to do this, it has to be zero tolerance or nothing. That’s just the only way to do it.

Sadly, today people care about luxury bathroom accessories more than grammar. And why should grammar be important to all of us? Well, because otherwise the world grinds to a halt, is why. Would you consider speaking without pauses to convey specific information? No, so don’t think it’s OK to do so with the written word.

It’s truly a tragic state of affairs which we should all be ashamed of. Bad spellings and terrible sentence structure are just the beginning – we haven’t even got to wrong usage of quotation marks and speech marks in British and US English yet, or the fact that US English demands US to be spelt like so: U.S. (While British is simpler: US.)

I hope I didn’t make a mistake myself or that would be embarassing…

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“Innit”

Or something to that effect. I am not quite sure what is happening in our society, all I know is that I find it both alarming and disgraceful. I am not sure why people expect to be respected when they can’t even speak their own language.

I plan to do my part to bring back the height of culture by posting here frequently used errors and mistakes in spelling and grammar.

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