Ok look, you could be the best CEO that ever graced your industry. You might be the most influential Managing Director in your field. You might even have made one or two brilliant discoveries in science, economics or medicine. But unless you get these four grammatical necessities right, your report writing could make you look, well, silly.
These are errors that are so commonly made that it’s a wonder they haven’t made it into colloquial English, at least. But since I’ll never make an important contribution to science, economics or medicine, my contribution to the world will have to be to try and save the language from these dastardly deeds.
- It’s, when you mean its. An apostrophe illustrates a contraction. “It’s” is a contraction of “it is”. The possessive pronoun “its” may seem wrong considering we use the apostrophe when allocating ownership of something to a person, such as “Peter’s”, but in this case, drop the punctuation.
- Your, when you mean you’re. Again with the contractions. “You’re” is a contraction of “you are”. Simple, right? “Your” means something belonging to you. Just think when using these. It’s not hard.
- They’re, there and their. And one more contraction. “They’re” is the shortened version of “they are”. “There” refers to a place. “Their” is another possessive pronoun.
It may seem elementary to point out these often incorrectly confused words but their mis-use is becoming increasingly common. The pedantic grammar nazi in me is happier just for blogging about it.
