Fall into the correct grammar patterns!
November is a month to give thanks to loved ones, health and happiness. Reading and writing are two of my favorite pastimes (both at home and in the office), so I decided to make a list of my Grammar Pet Peeves with easy-to-remember rules to cure the bad copywriting bug that’s been going around lately. 
(Please note: a few I already mentioned on the Blue Tide Productions Blog, but thought they were important enough to reiterate.)
1. Review your sentences and remove the word “that.” In most cases, your sentences still make sense without that word. The more you can condense your sentences and tighten up copy, the better.
2. Finally, an easy way to remember they’re, they’re, and there!:
They are = they’re. Think of it as a drunken slur, you are just running the words together quickly.
So clearly, their = the “other” one, used for possessive. Easy to remember because an “heir” gets stuff. It just has a T in front of it.
And lastly, “there” indicates a location or destination. Also easy to remember because it is like the word “here” (another location/destination) with a T in front of it.
I.e. They’re going to pick up their car from there.
3. Capitalization versus little letters? Depending on the type of site and copy you are crafting, capitalization comes into play in a big way.
The Big Game. A powerful title, needing all caps.
That’s what SHE said. (Self explanatory.)
Eenie,meenie, miney mo…I may choose not to capitalize any of this sentence if I think the viewer will get the ambiguous feeling better without them.
4. God bless bullets. Not the ammunition, but the lovely little dots that help us categorize an otherwise bulky and confusing paragraph. We should all use them more often to help structure thoughts, outline documents and sum up reports. All too often a paper comes across my desk that is completely essay-style, and it takes too much brainpower to decipher meaning. Help your supervisor (or audience) sift through your thoughts by keeping similar content in list format.
5. Alliteration is always an appropriate option. If it rolls off the tongue smoothly, try typing it out and seeing if it also flows well when your eyes move over the text. If I had used words that started with other letters like “Alliteration is typically a reasonable selection,” it just wouldn’t resonate properly.
6. Make dashing sentences by using perhaps the most underrated mark of punctuation – the em dash. Add a little drama and anticipation to your readers, and leave them wanting more. Girls should be good at this one. The width of the letter m, em dashes may replace commas, semicolons, colons, and parentheses to indicate added emphasis, an interruption, or an abrupt change of thought.
Examples:
It was my favorite day of the week – payday.
He was the hardest-working intern we ever hired – period.
7. Commas suck, any way you splice it.
A comma splice is the incorrect use of a comma to connect two independent clauses (a phrase that is grammatically and conceptually complete: that is, it can stand on its own as a sentence.) To correct the comma splice, you can:
* replace the comma with a period, forming two sentences
* replace the comma with a semicolon
* join the two clauses with a conjunction such as “and,” “because,” “but,” etc.
Example:
Let’s go to lunch, I am hungry. INCORRECT
Let’s go to lunch. I am hungry. CORRECT
Let’s go to lunch; I am hungry. CORRECT
Let’s go to lunch because I am hungry. CORRECT
8. Active verbs are healthy verbs! Active versus passive verbs
While there are exceptions to the rule, powerful sentences require action verbs to get the point.
The ball was dropped on this project by our team. INCORRECT
We dropped the ball on this project. CORRECT
If you every use the words “was, were, have or has been” family, ask yourself why. If it makes more sense and sounds better flipped around when you say it aloud, then in probably looks better on paper as well.
9. OMG. Text Jargon is NOT okay in the work environment.
Instant Messages to your colleague is one thing, but sending an email, ad, memo or report is quite another (no matter how close you are with clientele). I’d love to commend Marc Brownstein on an excellent post in Ad Age about this subject: U Think U R Such a Professional? Plz!
10. Don’t use words that are “too big for a sentence’s britches.”
There is a time and a place for showing off your vernacular and if you can’t tell the difference, it harms you more than it helps you. For example, a simple headline doesn’t need to use extensive vocabulary, especially if it makes readers stumble over the words. Nobody has time for it – they will drop it and move on to something else. Of course, in a 10-year strategic plan for your company, colloquial speech is accepted and in most cases, expected for the high-level eyes browsing the document.
Hope this hints help. What are your big pet peeves when it comes to grammar and writing?
Tags: grammar mistakes, punctuation rules
