So today’s info graphic at DailyInfographic.com highlights 15 grammar mistakes that make you look silly (and annoy the heck out of me). See it below:
Another great visual resource for improving your grammar skills can be found at theoatmeal.com’s Grammar Section. See my favorite, 10 Words You Need to Stop Misspelling and How to Use a Semicolon.
Is it my imagination, or are grammatical mistakes more common now than in past decades? It seems so to me. Maybe it’s the engineer part of my brain, but errors in grammar irritate me a lot. There is a logic to grammar and when it’s violated, it promotes goofs and sometimes unnecessary hard feelings.
This is another excellent use of Infographics. I also highly recommend the ever-useful and ageless little handbook, The Elements of Style, by Strunk and White. They also address syntax, something also regularly mangled in our culture.
I don’t know, if you want to see some bad grammar check out the letters written by Civil War or World War II soldiers home. I think we have become more sticklers of it – even though I believe that language is a living and evolving entity. A lot of our grammatical rules are arbitrary and based off of Latin, and so don’t work too well. For example, “never split an infinitive.” Well, that would make one of my favorite shows have the most awkward entries: “To go boldly!” instead of “To boldly go!” The same with the issue about ending a word with a preposition – sometimes, to do so otherwise makes it sound bizarrely awkward.
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Funny…for some reason I have been struggling with “then” and “than” these days. But I attribute it to my lack of sleep. Meh! Brings back memories of how to use the semicolon! Love it!