Friday, March 4, 2011

Official Grammar Day -- No Joke

As soon as I learned that today was the official Grammar Day, I knew I just had to post something about it.

    Obviously, grammar is important, but I promise not to give you a lecture over it or anything, because that's not how I roll.

    Instead, I've looked up some common grammar errors.  In no particular order, and chosen completely at random, here they are:

        -Mixing up "it's" and "its"
        -Using apostrophes -- possessives and contractions
        -Mixing up "they're," their," and "there"
        -"Good" instead of "Well" -- which everyone's been guilty of at least once
        -Interchanging "who," "what," and "that"
        -Lack of subject/verb agreement
        -Run-ons
        -"Lay" instead of "lie"
        -"Then" -vs.- "Than"
        -Double negatives
       
    Some people are also against fragments, which I don't have a problem with.  While I can see why you wouldn't want to use them in professional writing or those scary end-of-the-year school tests, in more casual writing -- especially fiction, when the author's voice has plenty of room to shine.

    On the other hand, you don't want the kind of fragment in the last sentence, where the sentence sort of dropped off into nothingness.  But when they're used to stress a point, in my book, you're in the clear.

    Does your manuscript have any of these issues?  If so, go fix it... I mean, it's Grammar Day.  How could you pass that up?

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