Rex Trulove
When the wrong words are used in writing, the error stands out and many, if not most readers will notice it. This is true of hard copy and of online writing. However, errors often appear more often with online writing because what is written can go live so much faster.
Everyone makes mistakes and a lot of them can be caught and corrected before submission, just through proofreading. We are talking about simple words that are often misused. People who don’t have English as a native language very commonly make these mistakes. However, it isn’t just ESL people who occasionally goof. Many native English speakers also make the errors, too. It is worthwhile to look at some of these words that are often used incorrectly.
There, they’re and their
These three words are often misused, though they don’t need to ever be. They have totally different meanings. Yet, even professional websites occasionally use the wrong word. Knowing which to use is quite simple.
‘There’ most often is a location. Something can be found ‘there’. It can also be used as a modifier, such as in the sentence, “There must be another answer.”
‘They’re’ is a contraction of “they are”. Often, by substituting the long form of ‘they are’ for ‘they’re’, a person can tell if the word belongs in the sentence.
‘Their’ is a possessive word that means ‘it belongs to them’.
Here is a sentence that uses all three of these words: Their house, where they’re living, is over there. Notice that the words are definitely not interchangeable, even though they sound similar. The mistakes are simple ones, but they are also quite common.
Examples of improper word usage can be found on many websites, too. One such instance is when a site informs the reader that if they click a link, they will be taken to ‘there website’. Using the word in this way would create a double location, since ‘there’ is a location and so is ‘website’. Naturally, the author would have been actually referring to a website that belonged to them, whoever ‘them’ is. Thus, what they really meant to say is that clicking on the link would take you to “their website”.
Once you firmly grasp the difference between the three words, there is no longer a reason you should ever mistakenly use one of them when you should have used another. That doesn’t mean that you won’t occasionally intend on typing one thing and end up typing another, but if that happens, the error will hopefully be seen when you proofread. Still, it starts with a solid understanding of what the words mean. Lord knows that I make my share of grammatical and word usage errors, but the more you know about the words, the fewer errors you are apt to make.
Improper word usage is one of the biggest causes of grammatical errors because the wrong word throws the grammar of the sentence off completely. It is worth noting, thinking about and understanding.
Those are very hard words at times to use and a lot do not use them in a proper sentence. I am glad you pointed out that all make mistakes and also included those that English is their mother tongue.
Thanks for that.
To be fair, there are non-native speakers who make the same mistake. There are just fewer because native speakers never had to learn the meanings of words, sentence structure, and so forth. They learned how to speak English from the time they formed their first words. English *is* taught to Americans in school, but it isn’t emphasized. Add to that the fact that Americans are basically lazy. (I include myself in that. I’m Cherokee and you can’t get much more American than that. lol)
It is laziness, but it could also be said of many languages. Native speakers don’t necessarily learn the proper way. Someone who must learn the language usually does so through some form of schooling where they learn ONLY the right way. If they don’t learn it through schooling, they are apt to make the same simple mistakes. Many Filipinos, Chinese, and other Asians make simple mistakes in English, but that is normally because they learn a pidgin version that isn’t proper.
My son-in-law is from Guatemala and speaks Spanish as a first language. He has difficulty with English mostly because he never learned it through schooling. He’s understandable, but makes simple errors.
When I taught English to high school students, I started failing any paper that made these mistakes after I had taught the meanings several times. That also applied to “to,” “too,” and “two.” It didn’t matter. People just weren’t careful.
On has to be careful when writing online. Online spell checkers usually don’t catch these errors, since the words are correctly spelled, even if they aren’t used properly.
That is very true. There are programs like Grammarly that help, but again, the programs aren’t error-free. A lot of people write using devices that auto-correct, too. Auto-correct tools make things worse, very often. The best idea that I can think of is to learn the word meanings and to proofread things before submitting them. Even with proofreading, I still make mistakes, but I catch quite a few silly errors.
I catch myself not believing what my fingers are doing sometimes. When I proofread, I see I’ve made some of the worst spelling errors and I have no idea why. It’s not always auto-correct. I think it may be something happening to my brain.
On some sites the spellcheck is fabulous and seems to know what I really meant to type and underlines it so I can decide. I think myLot is a site that does that. HubPages won’t let us use Grammarly. They have their own programs, I guess.
I don’t make this mistake and I always thought that it is because I am not native and I had to study the differences.
I’m sure that studying the difference does help. My daughter has a college degree in English and I was surprised that they didn’t spend much time stressing how different the words are. She already knew the difference because she was home-schooled before she went to college, but the college seemed to assume that all their students already knew the information and a lot of them don’t.
The ability to write words in English can be a great challenge but it is worth it.
Sadly, in America, far too many people tend to either forget the basics of English or don’t even care. The fact that so many people send text messages and abbreviate everything because of it, doesn’t help much.
I see your point since the computer lingo in my view ruins the English language today.
One thing about the English language is that it is dynamic and continuously changing. New words are added to the dictionary every year, so some of that computer lingo has and will already officially entered the language, even if we don’t like it.
Sad to say but true that computer lingo has entered the English language.
That’s why English is one of my favourite languages! It’s so confusing yet rich and beautiful!
Yes, I’ve heard that it is one of the most difficult languages to learn for people who have a different mother tongue.