Common English Blunders

“… and if you’re school is near by, …”

Apostrophes, Common English Blunders, Contractions, Mispronunciations, Possessives, Pronouns

My wife got this in an email message recently.

Problem:
The word “you’re” is incorrect here.

Explanation:
The complete sentence in the message was “Please contact me and if you’re school is near by, I may be able to deliver them to you.”

The word “you’re” — spelled Y-O-U-APOSTROPHE-R-E — is a contraction of “you are”.

Clearly, the message writer did not intend to say “… and if you are school is near by, …”; that would be nonsensical.

Instead, the writer was referring to the reader’s school, so he should have used the possessive pronoun “your” — spelled Y-O-U-R.

I believe that the common English blunder of confusing the contraction “you’re” with the possessive pronoun “your” is due to the fact that many American English speakers mistakenly pronounce these two words in the same way.

Solution:
“… and if your school is near by, …”

“Pronounciation”

Common English Blunders, Mispronunciations, Misspellings, Nouns, Verbs

I frequently hear this and occasionally see this.

Problem:
“Pronounciation” is a misspelling and mispronunciation that makes the writer or speaker sound dumb.

Explanation:
“Pronounciation” is an ignorant conversion of the verb “pronounce” into a noun.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks, to avoid variations) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “pronunciation” — 20,700,000 matches
  • “pronounciation” — 1,130,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the correct word vs. the incorrect word by a ratio of 18.3-to-1, which is not good, especially given more than a million matches for the incorrect word.

Solution:
“Pronunciation”

“Spend 15 minutes everyday with the words.”

Adjectives, Adverbs, Common English Blunders

I saw this in a Web article about English.

Problem:
“Everyday” is an adjective, but an adverb is required here.

Explanation:
I was searching the Web for the negative effect of spelling errors when I found this sentence.

The sentence appeared in an article titled “COMMONLY MISSPELLED WORDS“, which gave parents the recommended frequency and duration of helping their children to learn the correct spellings of words.

Unfortunately, one can spell words correctly but still make mistakes with grammar.

“Everyday” — spelled E-V-E-R-Y-D-A-Y — tells you what. For example, an “everyday event” is something that occurs daily. In other words, “everyday” is an adjective; it modifies a noun (such as “event”).

In contrast, “every day” — spelled E-V-E-R-Y-SPACE-D-A-Y — tells you when. “It happens every day.” is an example of the correct use of “every day” (with the space in the middle).

The goal of the article writer was to tell the reader when to spend fifteen minutes with words.

Solution:
“Spend 15 minutes every day with the words.”