In this video version of the ProofreadNOW.com GrammarTip, President and Founder Phil Jamieson remarks on commonly misused words and phrases such as "irregardless," "hone in" and more!
In this video version of the ProofreadNOW.com GrammarTip, President and Founder Phil Jamieson remarks on commonly misused words and phrases such as "irregardless," "hone in" and more!
Topics: misused words, GrammarTip video, Video
Topics: misused words
The misuse of pronouns is the most common mistake people in all walks of life make. Fumbled pronouns are distractions, and they can kill your proposal, or your brochure, or your white paper, or even your sermon. You've heard us rail against public figures for swerving their pronouns. Well, it does drive us crazy, to the point where we want to send our daughters' grammar-challenged boyfriends off to the bookstore whenever they violate even the simplest rules of pronouns. (Hey, we can try, can't we?)
Topics: pronouns
We often proofread documents that contain bibliographic references. There are at least three "standard" forms for literary citations. The form you choose will depend on your readership.
Topics: bibliography, AMA, APA, Chicago Manual of Style
Don't ordinarily hyphenate adjectival combinations of adverb + adjective or adverb + participle unless the adverb does not end in ly and can be misread as an adjective.
Now--if that sounds like just a bunch of silly grammarese to you, let us put it simply: Don't hyphenate stuff like "fully involved" or "partially hidden treasure" -- if you do, people in the know who read your ad, proposal, white paper, cover letter, or contract will move it to the bottom of the stack and give preference to your competitors who make fewer mistakes. That's just a fact. Read on and find out if you're making other similar mistakes.
Topics: hyphenation
Phil Jamieson (Founder/President of ProofreadNOW.com) discusses how to properly combine adjectives and adverbs in this GrammarTip video.
Topics: adverbs, adjectives, GrammarTip video, Video
One of the most troublesome rules concerns whether or not to capitalize titles when they follow a person's name or are used in place of the name. According to many authorities, only the titles of "high-ranking" officials and dignitaries should be capitalized when they follow or replace a person's name. But how high is high? Where does one draw the line?
Topics: capitalization
We proofread hundreds of documents every week, so you would expect that we'd come to know the most common mistakes made in English business writing.
One of them has to do with a particular form of "is." Yes, it seems the most common mistake in writing today is the false contraction "it's." For example, "The throng made it's way to the center of the field."
Think this mistake is beneath you? Think again! A surprising number of well-educated people make this mistake in writing. Perhaps they're just writing too quickly. Or perhaps they're among those who may have just slept through fifth-grade English or eleventh-grade composition.
The word "it" is a pronoun. The word means "that one" and is either a subject or an object in a sentence. But here's something interesting: did you know that "its" is not a pronoun, but an adjective? Yes, "its" is an adjective describing the noun that follows. Make sure you never confuse the adjective "its" with the pronoun-verb construct "it's."
Variations on this mistake surround the use of "is." The contractions "that's," "what's," and "it's" -- plus the contractions formed with a noun and "is" (e.g., "Gracie's here today" and "The coop's not quite finished yet") -- are often avoided in formal writing.
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