Common grammar mistakes

Hey, we’ve all been there – ‘fellowing up’ on an email only to realise an embarrassing formatting error, or skimming an online article and having a cheeky smug moment at spotting an incorrectly spelt word. Just me then?

There are so many different, often conflicting rules of language that are just waiting to trip up the unaware, so here’s a little rundown of the most common perpetrators. It’s not something to stress endlessly over (even if it is an important work document – people are human!)

Tenses – present and past

Tenses can trip anyone up if you’re not careful – switching between the two can get confusing and even the most dedicated of readers won’t want to work hard just to get their brain around what’s going on! Of course, that isn’t to say you can’t switch tenses in your writing – but keep a consistent set of rules, separations or identifiers (e.g. chapter headings) so your readers can tell that the characters are experiencing past or present events.

The beast of the so-called ‘past perfect’ can also rear its head in situations like these, but it can be simply understood – all it means is that this is the furthest back events can go! For example, the past perfect of a knitter would be something like ‘I had knit a shawl’, whereas the simple past would be ‘I knitted a scarf’ – one step beyond! You can extrapolate the past perfect forwards into a sentence like: ‘I had knitted a blanket – for the baby’s Christening last week – now he won’t sleep without it!’ where all the separate components build on each other, moving forwards in time at each stage.

Possession (you’re or your)

Normally a pet peeve, the tricky aspect of differentiating you’re and your comes from the fact that they’re both homophones, meaning they sound the same. Especially in conversation – though usually the contact of the sentence will allow the listener to fill in the gaps – though when used incorrectly in writing, you’re at risk of sending your reader running for the hills.

To keep things simple – ‘you’re’ is a contraction of ‘you are’ – so if you’re struggling, try replacing it with the longer version to see if it still makes sense. Usually, this is best used alongside descriptive words. ‘Your’ is a possessive adjective, so can be used to directly refer to an object and the ownership of it. 

That small matter of apostrophe in or out is another place where you can start to stumble. In a reverse to what we discussed above, apostrophes are typically used to indicate possession – ‘my uncle’s beer’ or ‘her spaceship’. But I did sneak in the word contraction, so in this use case, the missing letters are replaced by the apostrophe. 

They’re, their and there 

Similar to the above, this set of triplets are also homophones! ‘There’ is the version you’re most likely to see in the wild, which refers to a time or place – such as ‘your sock is over there’ or ‘there’s no way I’m going there!’

‘Their’ is a possessive form again, coming from the third-person pronoun ‘they’ – another way of showing belonging. Examples include ‘that’s their coffee’ or ‘stealing their thunder’. 

‘They’re’ is just like the other examples we’ve been over, being a conglomerated version of the phrase ‘they are’. Hopefully that’s simple enough – it being so similar to the ‘you’re/your’ argument I’m going to let you think of your own examples for this one.

Pronouns

The main use of pronouns is to avoid repetition – you can refer to things using ‘hers/his/theirs’ etc to improve sentence flow and avoid clogging up text with the same thing over and over again. For example, ‘my burrito split apart and spilt burrito filling all over my clothes’ can become condensed into ‘my burrito spilt its filling onto my clothes’ with just a few changes and the use of pronouns.

Who am I speaking with?

Hopefully this foray into some of the main grammar mistakes will give you a good idea of what to keep an eye out for in your own writing. As they have many applications, you can take this advice into any writing you do – hobbyist short stories, work emails or any other words on a page!