In a brief post on Seth Godin’s Blog, Seth asks, Am I the only one distracted by apostrophes and weird “quoting”?
I’m happy to say, no, sir. You’re not the only one.
Atrocious grammar, spelling, and what those crazy kids today are passing off as shorthand drives me… well, crazy. Obviously there’s a time when it’s* okay to be sloppy: quick chats online, nothing you plan on using to market / advertise, that sort of thing. But formal letters and communication text in any form (web, print, etc.) that might give people their first impression of you? Come on. You’re not perfect; lose your pride and let someone else proof read your work before publicizing it.
Regarding apostrophes, here’s a quick lesson on IT’S and ITS that might help:
It’s: an abbreviation for “It is.” Example: It’s raining. (You could also say, It is raining.)
Its: possession. Example: The dog chased its own tail. (You would not also say, The dog chased it is own tail.)
Don’t even get me started on when people misuse then and than (or your and you’re) in a sentence.
Oy. I need help… (And I sure hope I didn’t misuse my “quoting”.)
*(Can you believe this? My MS-Word Grammar check tells me I should replace “it’s” here with “its”. No wonder people get it wrong so often.)
You did, however, misspell “crazy”. 18 words into paragraph three.
I certainly did! Good eye, Kyle. Error corrected, thanks.
My friend told me that one of her employees took a message for Don, the manager – only one sentence long. There was four spelling mistakes in it, including the managers name…”Dawn”. He said he didn’t know how to spell the name, and all he could think of was the dish soap.
My pet peeve is when people use hyphens, or worse — double hyphens, when they need and em dash or an em dash;
–
—
–
—
See, they’re all different sizes and mean different things.
I’m also not fond of “their” being used as a singular, gender-neutral pronoun.
For instance, “when a writer puts on their thinking cap…” is just wrong! wrong! wrong. It should read either, “when writers put on their thinking caps…” or “when a writer puts on his or her thinking cap…” or you can remove either the his or the her and go with a gender-specific pronoun.
That was today’s update from CRABBY OCD LADY.
CRABBY OCD LADY is bang on! And I still personally haven’t got the hang of the correct usage of all those dashes, hyphens and variations thereof, so instead of learning (who has the time?) I try to refrain from using them too often.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I believe I must re-read some of my posts to see if I am stretching the truth or not.