Forgive me, I have to air this out because it is driving me crazy. I have two major pet peeves with grammar: unnecessary capitalization and homonyms. Take note for scholarship essays!
There is no Reason to capitalize random Nouns that are not proper nouns while writing a Sentence. (See?) Please refer to the capitalization rules at: http://www.grammarbook.com/punctuation/capital.asp
Then there are homonyms. They sound alike but are not spelled alike. There, they're, their... you're, your... those are the biggest ones that I see being confused and none of them have remotely the same meaning so they are not interchangeable.
Here are four pages of these words, their definition and rules as to when to use each one if it is confusing (i.e. except and accept) http://www.grammarbook.com/homonyms/confusing-words-1.asp
Why does this come about, you ask? I see them quite frequently on Facebook status updates. Yes, it's "just" a social network, but I believe when many people can see you using grammar incorrectly it kind of looks bad for you. Sure everyone might be doing it, but wouldn't you want to look a little more educated? I also get them quite a bit in requests for scholarship applications, and it makes me worry a little bit that the reliance on computers has taken away the understanding of some of these grammatical rules.
I recall once a letter a friend sent to me to ask why it got such a negative response when she was coaching a youth cheerleading league. It was a letter to the parents of the children asking them to bring the children on time and prepared, and to be at practice every week. It had a fairly angry tone as she was quite exasperated when writing the letter. However, there were so many grammatical and spelling errors in the letter I had to send it back to her and tell her that I would have pulled my child out of a league in which a coach sends out a letter like that- not for the content or what it said but for the gross errors in the writing of the letter itself which reflected terribly on her.
So again, while not everything is of the magnitude of that letter or scholarship applications I think it is good to get in the good practice of knowing these grammatical rules and using them consistently... after all, you never know who is reading your Facebook status or Tweets!
PS- Are you following us on Twitter yet? www.twitter.com/anycollege
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I love that you posted about this because grammatical errors are one of my pet peeves! My husband is one who relies completely on his spell check and grammar check functions to fix those errors for him, so I often find myself correcting him. Glad to know that there is someone else out there who sees this in the same light I do!
ReplyDeleteBy the way, I must add that writing a comment on a post entirely about grammatical errors is very difficult because you are continually focusing on ensuring that you are using correct grammar! :)
Tell me about it! I must have re-read this thing 20 times before hitting the "post blog" button.
ReplyDeleteTop 40 Grammar Pet Peeves
ReplyDeleteIf you are grammatically challenged, or let’s face it, a grammatical snob who will catch the grammatical error in the title of this blog, you owe it to yourself to check out these grammatical pet peeves and tips at Top 40 Grammar Pet Peeves
Thanks Mark! It would figure that I missed something on this post. :)
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