Comments | lia1031: Lia’s guide to writing and speaking good...er, well

lia1031

Lia’s guide to writing and speaking good...er, well

Oct 23, 2006 23:05

The world is full of them, and they are all around me. When I see them, I wince with excruciating pain. Their perpetrators should be jailed.

What are they? They are mistakes in grammar, spelling and word usage. And they’re everywhere.

Since I can’t take a big red pen and correct every error in sight or strike from the record everything anyone has ( Read more... )

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anonymous October 24 2006, 22:30:53 UTC

I always stick to your guidelines on decades/years; however, I think some style manuals are cool with 1970's. I definitely can understand the argument for "Steven always got good grades: As or Bs" turning into "A's or B's," but I know that's not cool.

Also, the fewer vs. less thing--a little tricky, isn't it?

that was seth anonymous October 24 2006, 22:31:41 UTC

sorry

Re: that was seth lia1031 October 24 2006, 22:44:02 UTC

Hi Sethie!

Whichever style manuals are cool with 1970's should die. These rules all follow AP Style, which, when you're in journalism, is your bible.

I never liked the A's and B's thing. It does get confusing because "As" (I got three As on my exams) looks like "as" (but not as many as my friend). I'm not quite sure what AP says about that, though.

I just hate when people use apostrophes to make things plural: I ate three apple's. NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Just because a letter grade is, well, a letter, doesn't mean it should be allowed to become pluralized with an apostrophe.

The fewer vs. less concept is a little-known fact--most people don't know the difference. So, please, make the world a better place and correct people whenever possible. That's what I do. =)

Re: that was seth anonymous October 25 2006, 03:23:16 UTC

You know what's even worse than "apple's"? Ladie's bathroom. That's just too much, man.

Re: that was seth anonymous October 27 2006, 01:56:28 UTC

General English grammar, which AP style often contradicts, does indeed condone apostrophes after years and mandates them after letters. Now, you said,

Your means belonging to you.

When you wrote this, you correctly italicized "Your," but needed to place "belonging to you" in quotation marks. Forgetting to do this often makes sentences very confusing.

Oo! Here are another couple of good rules for ya'll:

1. "Ya'll" doesn't make any sense. What does the apostrophe replace? The "ou" in "you." So write "y'all."
2. Two-word adjectives must be hyphenated, unless the first word is a well-chosen adverb.

Lia, your examples were incredible. Did you get those from a style manual, by any chance?

Benjamin

Re: that was seth lia1031 October 27 2006, 02:05:42 UTC

Thank you for the correction.

I don't hear people say "y'all" very often because I'm from Chicago. Down south in St. Louis, though, I bet you hear it all the time...

Don't even get me started on hyphens. Ohhhh man. I love hyphens, but the rest of the world seems to hate them. I could do a whole post on how to use hyphens. I have a million other grammar pet peeves but I wanted to focus on 10 here. Maybe I'll do another post in a while with my next 10 grammar pet peeves. But yeah. Use hyphens, kids.

And my examples were all from up here [points to head], thank you very much. I'm not going to lie, I often spend much more time on blog posts than I do on other things, like homework. But I had a lot of fun coming up with those examples!

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