Grammar confusions

Yesterday I gave the first of three workshops to a company about how to write better.

One of the things that I covered were confusions in grammar of which there seem to be many.

These are three that seemed to be tripping people up.

1. They’re/their/there
2. Where/we’re/ware/wear
3. And the dreaded apostrophe

The first two are similar in that they’re similar sounding words.  The problem when working in Word is that as long as you spell the word correctly, it won’t pick it up as a mistake in Word spellchecker.

The dreaded apostrophe, or the greengrocer’s curse is so far down the road to acceptance with incorrect use that sometimes I think we can’t retrieve it.

The basic rule is that is stands in for a letter or letters that are missing:

It’s a lovely day today originally started out as It is a lovely day today.

It also shows up if something belongs to someone/thing:

The basket of the dog or the dog’s basket. Or – the book of John of John’s book.

In the case of the possession it’s a less cumbersome way of expressing the same fact.

I’m giving two more workshops so I’ll let you know next week what else other people found tricky.