I usually pride myself in having excellent grammar, but this week was pretty tough! It was hard to have to think about each component in a sentence.
Okay, okay, here are some of the grammar mishaps I found:
A headline in the New York Times read, "Ex-F.B.I Leader's Ray Rice Inquiry Poses Risk." As we learned last week in our punctuation exercise, FBI is a widely recognized government agency and it does not require periods between the letters.
I also found that many of my Facebook friends omit the subject in their sentences. For example, one of my friends wrote, "So grateful for these two." Who is grateful? Tsk-tsk.
While I scrolled through my newsfeed, I also saw a lot of mishaps with then/than. A disturbing amount of my friends confuse then as a comparative word. Oops!
My 11th Rule:
The book's 10 rules are pretty comprehensive, but if I had to add my own, it would be "better safe than sorry." My rule stems from my conservative nature. Always double-check your spelling. Sometimes, we get stuck writing something a certain way and it begins to look correct. For a long time, I wrote "exited" instead of "excited." Gross, I know. What can I say? I learned English when I was nine. But I saw people writing "excited" and overlooked it so much that I actually believed they were wrong and I was right. The truth is that it doesn't hurt to double-check how something should be spelled and it's always worth the effort.
I think it is important to double-check your own writing as well. I can't seem to type more than a paragraph or two without going back over briefly to make sure there aren't any mistakes. I find it becomes rather difficult to check the whole document at once when you've finished, or at least you leave yourself with less errors to catch at the end if you double-check yourself along the way.
ReplyDeleteFlo,
ReplyDeleteI know I'm late to comment on your blogs, but I am so happy we are in this class together. The week with the Grammar Check-up was the roughest one for me so far. I also thought I had excellent grammar. I was surprised by how many mistakes I actually made.
"Better safe than sorry" is a great 11th rule. Review is crucial in editing. I'm learning that more and more as this course continues.