Wikipedia:Common grammatical errors

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Listed here are common grammatical errors in English that are usually picked up over the Internet. Note: You may find though that evolution of a language may somehow negate this.

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style.

[edit] Common sentence structure mistakes

• Punctuation should go either inside or outside quotation marks depending on whether or not the punctuation is part of the quotation. See Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Quotation marks.
• Use square brackets within parentheses when you must use parentheses again. (i.e. She spoke ironically [meaning jokingly].)
• Punctuation goes outside parentheses that are a part of the sentence (as in the above example or this example). They go inside the parentheses if it's actually a sentence. (e.g. She spoke ironically. [This meant she was joking.])
• Use a semicolon in the place of a period when joining two sentences that share a central idea. For example: "Many people think that semicolons are used the same way as commas. They are not." → "Many people think that semicolons are used the same way as commas; however, they are not."
• Use an em dash (—) instead of "-" or "--".
• Apostrophes should be used only for contractions ("It's OK to use one here") or possessive form ("Bob's use of apostrophes is correct"). It is common and incorrect to use an apostrophe to indicate a plural ("Error's like this are annoying") except for plurals of single letters (mind your P's and Q's).

[edit] Common misspellings

Error → Correction.

(Ordered by commonness.)

• "alot" → "a lot".
• "it's" ¹ → "its".
• "who's" ¹ → "whose".
• "lets" (3rd person present simple active form of the verb "to let" as in: "Bill lets his son use his credit card") → "let's" (contraction for "let us" as in: "Let's go to the store.").
• "todo" → "to do".
• "upto" → "up to".
• "ofcourse" → "of course".
• "allright" or "alright"² → "all right".
• "allways" or "all ways"³ → "always".
• "their" → "they're".
• "theirselves" → "themselves".
• "affect" versus "effect".

• "buisness" → "business".
• "pronounciation" → "pronunciation".
• "arguement" → "argument".
• "definately", "definetely", … → "definitely".
• "ressource" → "resource"

See Wikipedia:List_of_common_misspellings for countless others.

¹ "It" and "who" are pronouns, not nouns. Therefore when they are used as possessives, they are not written like contractions "it's" ("it is") and "who's" ("who is").

² "Alright" is a nonstandard spelling that has become heavily used due to its analogy with similar contractions such as "always" and "almighty". Wikipedia prefers standard writing.

³ "All ways" is only written "always" if you are not referring to "all possibilities". (i.e. "She is better than him in all ways," versus, "She is always better than him.")