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

  • Use square brackets within parentheses when you must use parentheses again (i.e., "She spoke ironically [meaning jokingly]").
  • 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 should be used the same way as commas; they should not be." → "Many people think that semicolons are used the same way as commas, but they should not be." In fact, if the second sentence is very directly connected to the first, a colon is often the best choice ("Ellen wanted to go to college: she hoped to become a physician").
  • It is not often recognized that there are indeed grammatically correct uses of the comma to connect two independent clauses. For example, if the first sentence is imperative: "Come here, I want to speak to you".
  • Use either an em dash (—) or en dash (–) instead of "-" or "--". This depends, however, on the typesestting system available.
  • Apostrophes should be used only for contractions ("It's OK to use one here") or possessive form ("Bob's use of apostrophes is correct"), with few exceptions. It is common and incorrect to use an apostrophe to indicate a plural ("Error's like this are annoying"). According to many styles, however, this is acceptable for plurals of single letters ("Mind your P's and Q's"), and plurals of acronyms ("We encountered many IED's").
  • Do not use constructions like "as good or better than", since "as good than", etc., makes no sense by itself. If you must use this phrasing, it should be "as good as or better than" since then each part stands on its own. But a more graceful phrasing is "at least as good as".

[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.").

  • "everyday" is only an adjective meaning common, ordinary, quotidian. But "every day" (two words!) is the adverb (or to be precise, the adverbial phrase) meaning "daily". This mistake is found depressingly often in commercials and signs inside stores.
  • "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 he is.")