Grammar Mistakes Commonly Found in Digital Communication

Have you ever opened your email and cringe because you know the sender is sure to include some grammar mistake that just grinds your nerves? Maybe you’re one of those guilty people who still don’t know the difference between its and it’s. Sure, many grammar mistakes probably result from quick fingers and typos, but some mistakes are just plain annoying. Read on to see how you compare to the English majors of the world.

You’re vs. Your

Come on now people, how difficult is it to differentiate between a possessive pronoun (your) and a contraction of “you are” (you’re). We all learned in 2nd grade that the apostrophe indicates a missing letter, in this case the ‘a’ in are. Next time you’re writing a short email be sure to take an extra second to check your word choice.

It’s vs. Its

This one drives me crazy, probably because my boss mixes up the two words all the time! Here, it’s is shorthand for it is or it has, while its is another possessive pronoun. If you happen to temporarily forget the difference, try substituting in “it is,” and make sure that your sentence still makes sense.

There vs. Their vs. They’re

Here you don’t even have 50/50 odds since 3 homophones are in the mix. As in the cases from above, they’re contains an apostrophe, and as such it is a contraction for ‘they are’. Now we’re down to 2 words, one indicating place and one indicating people. I tend to remember that their contains an ‘i’ which is a person. That leaves there to mean a place. Simple, right?

May vs. Can

“Can I have a piece of that cake?” I don’t know, can you? Well, yes, as long as you are physically able to eat. The long and the short of it is this: if you are asking permission for something use may.

i.e. vs. e.g.

We don’t speak Latin anymore, so why do we use these abbreviations? To make us look smart, of course! Whenever you mean “for example” use e.g. which is an abbreviation for exempli gratia. If you mean “that is” substitute i.e., an abbreviation for id est.

Hopefully you’re now less likely to make one of those pesky little grammar mistakes when shooting off a quick email. If you have any grammar pet peeves of your own, then please leave me a comment below.