This week’s guest post comes from Antonia Chitty, author Blogging: The Essential Guide.

 

Have you just started writing? Or do you have fabulous ideas but struggle a little with spelling and grammar? There are some common pitfalls that writers make that I see time and time again. Read this post and you will be able to avoid them.

Here are my top 10 mistakes to watch out for:

 

    1. Your / you are: Use ‘your’ when showing ownership, as in ‘your blog’ and ‘you are’ when you mean ‘you are’.

    2. It’s / its: It’s is short for ‘it is’, while ‘its’ is a possessive pronoun. E.g. ‘It’s going to be a long day’ or ‘My blog has rather lost its way’.

    3. There / their: there is a place, ‘their’ is something belonging to them.

    4. Practice /practise: think of advice and advise: practice with a c is a noun, whereas practise with a s is a verb.

    5. Effect / affect: Effect is a noun – you can create an effect, while affect is a verb – someone affects someone or something else.

    6. Complimentary / complementary : the former means something free, while the latter is something that fits well with something else.

    7. Loose / lose: loose is an adjective, a word that describes a noun’ my tooth is loose’, ‘there is a tiger on the loose’, and lose is a verb, ‘to lose your tooth’, ‘I always lose my tiger’.

    8.  i.e. / e.g. i.e. means ‘that is’, whereas e.g. means for example.
    9. Could of, would of / could have, would have: Never write ‘could of’ – the correct English is could have. This applies for would, should, etc.
    10. A company is always singular e.g. ‘Dickens and Jones is opening a new branch’, rather than ‘Dickens and Jones are…’

Antonia Chitty is author of 15 practical non fiction books on business, health and parenting. Her latest book is Blogging: The Essential Guide which is useful for any author who wants to raise their profile online.