How
timely. Just last week I shared a Grammarly Facebook (FB)
graphic “A lot is always two words.” My
accompanying comment was “I always want to make one word and I have to
consciously remind myself every time that it's two words. Do you have something
like that happen to you? I like to think I'm trainable and this makes me wonder
if I am.” I learned that a lot of people are in the same situation
I bring
this up as a recent Yahoo Small Business Insider blog post 10 Common Grammar Mistakes Even Smart People Make had my
little issue as number three on the list.
It also talks about it’s vs its, or the overuse of apostrophes for
plurals. I know that my fingers on the
keyboard love to always put apostrophes and then I need to go back and remove
all the extraneous ones. It also doesn’t
hurt that Microsoft Word puts red squiggles (like it’s indignant that I would
consider using an apostrophe there) where I have probably initially incorrectly
used an apostrophe (never mind other spelling and grammar issues).
Why am I writing about grammar on a genealogy blog? Well, don’t we all write up our research
results? Don’t many of us post comments and questions about our research
online? Our family history research
crowd does a lot of writing! We need to
make sure that we don’t distract our readers with enough mistakes that they
question or ignore our messages.
For anything I do online, I also use Grammarly Lite (free)
to highlight any errors I might be in the process of making.
The post about 10 common mistakes was a follow-up post to 30 Incorrectly Used Words That Can Make You Look Bad; another
list that we can learn from.
For a more visual and fun way to appreciate some of these errors, check
out The Oatmeal
(Grammar page).
It almost makes me wish that I had spent more time paying attention in my
high school English classes, though, I really did like the math and science
classes so much better!
Are
there grammar issues that you find are a particular plague to genealogical
writing? Do family historians have
certain writing tendencies that drive you bonkers?
Editor’s Note: I hope you appreciate
that I correctly spelled “a lot” and correctly used “it’s and its” in this blog
post!
Editor’s Note: Note that I said “enough mistakes” instead of “any” mistakes. I am a firm believer that no matter how hard we try sometimes, a spelling or usage or factual mistake creeps into what we write. I cannot tell you how many times a piece, which has been reviewed by many, ends up being published with an error. We are human. Mistakes happen. I think most of us have the forbearance to recognize that mistakes do happen and in spite of them we can still appreciate what someone has written. I do believe though that many mistakes can distract (and/or frustrate) a reader enough that they will stop reading what you have written. We don’t want that to happen.
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