CyberSunshine's Guide to Grammar: Don't Make These Mistakes in Your Blog, Part III

Time for three more grammatical lessons to help you expand your knowledge of the English language and (hopefully) seem smarter when you write things. This section will cover apostrophes, double negatives, and making confusing word choices.

7. Improper Usage of Words
We are all guilty of this. Maybe some of us more often than others, but I know you're not perfect and you have made a mistake before. Misusing words is one of the most common (and most annoying) grammatical errors out there. Some of the more commonly misused ones are:
- There, Their, They're
- It's, Its
- You're, Your
I'm not going to give an explanation of every one of these, because that would take all day. But the basics to know are these:
- An apostrophe followed by other letters means a merging of two words. So You're means You Are. Same goes for They're. It means They Are.
- It's means It Is. It does not insinuate that something belongs to It.
- There is a place, and Their means belonging to Them.
If you want additional explanations, and examples of more of these misused words (yes, there are more of them!) go here.

8. Apostrophe Disasters
Apostrophes are pretty basic. You use them for (mainly) two reasons. The first is to show ownership. The second (as we learned above) is to merge words. But you can't just make up your own word merge and throw an apostrophe in there. That's not how it works. Anyway, here are some examples of those:
- Ownership: Tim's bike, the Realtor's blog
- Word Merge: Don't = Do Not, Could've = Could Have
As with everything, there are many, many more examples of how people screw these up, and the best ones I found are here. One additional thought on apostrophes... If you are writing about the 1980s (or whichever time period you like the most), there is NO apostrophe! Leave it off.

9. Don't Do Double Negatives
Double negatives surprisingly go unnoticed by many writers. This is one of the reasons I highly recommend reading what you write before you publish your post (or whatever you're writing). A double negative sentence is where you use two negative words in combination, therefore making it a positive. For example: "I don't want nobody to come visit us next month," actually means that I do want people to visit. The correct way to say this would be, "I don't want anybody to come visit us next month." Don't and Nobody are both negatives, so they cancel each other out. Here's some more information on double negatives, including a list of common ones.

And so comes the end of our grammatical lesson. Stayed tuned for the next awesome series. It'll be a good one, I promise!