I have been asked to do a brown-bag-lunch kind of workshop for a professional organization for administrative assistant/clerical types. They want a “common mistakes and how to avoid them” kind of presentation.
I know my personal pet peeves, but my sister, an education prof., tells me I’m a dinosaur for giving a crap about the rules for using “which” and “that.”
So what can I touch on in an hour? The things I’ve thought about are:
The Grocer’s Apostrophe (as in “Banana’s, 69¢ a pound”)
Its/It’s
Random acts of Capitalization
MS Word’s grammar check is not your friend
Between you and I, who should I ask?
One that I keep having a brain glitch on lately is “who’s” and “whose”. Stupid, I know. But it might fit into the it’s-its lesson. Also their-they’re-there.
Speaking of which: sentence frgments. Fun for all!
Your conscience usually eats at you while you’re conscious.
To, two, and too
Whom: only after prepositions and when it’s the direct or indirect object. Who is a subject or predicate noun. (I will admit that this rule confuses the hell out of me in the best of circumstances, and that it’s dying a quiet death, but most people expect it in formal situations.)
Definitely is not equal to definately.
Oh, and I think it’s supposed to be “between you and me,” because between is a preposition and I/me is the object of it, so the pronoun should be in the objective case. Unless that sentence was a complete whoosh, in which case I apologize.
Along those lines, the tendency to say “Which is why I’m leading that meeting” or “Who is the person who hired me” and have them be complete sentences is something that should be addressed, as they seem to be rather … clever little buggers when it comes to making a home in written English.
I don’t suppose there’s enough time to cover why “She, was there” is fundamentally wrong or why it is not actually a cardinal sin to end a sentence with a preposition (or an adverb, as is often the case) or split an infinitive.
– While typing on the keyboard, the computer crashed.
– While herding the cows, the rain started to fall.
– While reading a book, the lights went off.
Usually good for a laugh or two from your students as they try to picture computers typing, rain herding, and lights reading; and such problems are easy enough to fix. Just specify who or what is doing the action:
– While I was typing on the keyboard, the computer crashed.
– While the cowboys were herding the cows, the rain started to fall.
– While Sue was reading a book, the lights went off.
These are known as fumblerules, though this list doesn’t have one of my favorites: Avoid using too many prepositional phrases, unless you area walking through the valley of the shadow of death…
I really think that if people are misusing the basics (i.e. its, it’s, their-there-they’re), then advanced concepts (dangling participles, prepositional endings, etc) just aren’t going to go over well. At best you’ll get a glazed over look as they tune you out (uh…out they tune you?).
I hear that from my daughter and it drives me ballastic. That statement, or something similar, is usually followed by a demand for her to refund the money we have paid for her college tuition…
‘Yourself’ is not the fancy version of ‘you’.
‘Ourselves’ is not the fancy term for ‘us’
Unfortunately this is not fixable. Every memo I have got at jobs for the last 10 years has said at the end “If you have any questions, ask myself.”
If I have a question, I should ask myself ?
I now have people phoning me at work saying “I have an account with yourselves.”
I made another thread on this called ‘Myself loves yourself’.
