There is nothing worse than putting a blog out there and realizing that you are deterring your audience due to unprofessional grammar errors. You want to put an important message out there or attract an audience to your business and you had no idea your blog is looking sloppy and full of mistakes.
Mistakes are bound to happen as we are all human, but it’s noted by audiences when a blogger hardly ever contains them. It says something about the attention to detail when a blogger takes the time to edit, proofread and use punctuation or grammar techniques that you don’t see on an everyday basis.
Errors are everywhere on the web and even bestselling authors of the New York Times have been guilty of using them in their books. While your mind knows what you want to say, make sure your computer does too by editing carefully and looking for any possible errors. Here is a look at the common grammar mistakes people make online so that you can double check for them in your writing.
Using a comma after a prepositional phrase
You probably haven’t heard the term “prepositional phrase” since high school but people use them constantly and forget to add the comma. Commas are one of the easiest mistakes to make as many people get confused on when to use them regardless of their level of knowledge of English grammar.
The prepositional phrase starts with a preposition such as “at,” “since,” “after,” and “when.” The phrase would be any of the words that modifies the object such as “at the park” or “since I need to go.” When you use phrases like these, you need to add a comma so that it reads logically. For example, you should write “When I ate dinner, I wasn’t hungry again for the rest of the day.
Commonly Misspelled Terms
While your spell checker is going to catch common misspellings, it won’t catch when you use the wrong version of a word that is spelled correctly. With words like two, too and to, you’ll have to know which one makes sense in the sentence because spell check won’t notice if you’ve chosen the wrong version of the word.
Another common mistake is lose and loose, where many people want to choose the wrong one for their sentence. Be sure to use lose for things that you’ve lost and loose to describe how something fits such as “loose pants” or “loose change.”
Affect is often used in place of effect and vice versa. Make sure you use affect as a verb “to influence” and effect as a noun to mean “a result.” Use effect in a sentence such as “Her new haircut affected her self-esteem” or “As an effect of her haircut, she had better self-esteem.”
Lastly, watch out for complement verses compliment. Complement means that something goes well together like a pair of shoes with an outfit. Compliment refers to complimenting or flattering another person.
Run-on sentences and misusing pronouns
Bloggers often use run-on sentences when they write to get their point across. In other circumstances, they don’t complete the sentence which results in a sentence fragment. Make sure your sentences have a noun, verb and object and are completely sentences. Your readers will be annoyed by an incomplete thought or one that goes on too long, so be careful of run-on sentences with too many commas.
Another common mistake is misusing pronouns. When you are speaking about an individual, you wouldn’t use the word “their” to describe something of the person’s. Instead, the word “person” indicates this is a single person which means the pronoun would be “his” or “her.”
You could say “a person has to watch his or her back” but not “a person has to watch their back.” Be sure to follow the pronoun with a singular or plural complementary pronoun to avoid confusion with your readers.
You should always have a second set of eyes look over your work to check for grammar errors that you may have missed, as well as spelling issues or awkward phrases that spell check could have missed. Read it out loud to yourself and make sure it sounds proper and like something your readers would be interested to hear. If you have any struggles in reading it smoothly, your readers will probably have the same issue.
