In real estate marketing your grammar and word choices really do make a difference - because in many instances the words you choose are the first impression your prospects have of you and your professionalism.
Your primary goal should be to make your words "disappear." In other words, your reader shouldn't have to think about the words at all - he or she should just absorb the message.
To accomplish that, you have to eliminate anything that creates a stop sign - where the reader has to stop, look twice, and figure out what you meant to say.
There are all kinds of stop signs. Misspelled words, editing errors, misplaced modifiers - and the use of words that might sound like what you meant, but when written, mean something else entirely.
We've discussed manyof these pairs: your/you're; there/their; hear/here; rain/reign/rein; sole/soul; heel/heal; etc.
One that really puzzles me is our / are.
They aren't spelled similarly, and the meanings are SO far apart...
Usually the misuse is something like "That's are car." Today I saw it incorrectly used the opposite way: "Most of us our area experts right?"
I stopped and read that three times before I realized that the writer meant "Most of us are area experts."
So for anyone who doesn't know - and I doubt if that includes anyone who will read this post -but just in case...
"Are" is a verb. It's one of the forms of "to be": "be, am, is, are, was, were, been" that we should all have learned in elementary school.
We are all members of Active Rain. You are area experts. They are tired after a hard day at work. Cats are usually more aloof than dogs.
"Our" is a determiner - an adjective indicating ownership.
Our family, our car, our house, our favorite restaurant, our city, our country, our planet, our environment, our hopes for the future.
For more word choice rants...
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