Saturday, October 24, 2009

Funny Pictures of Inexcusable Grammar Errors


Funny Pictures of Inexcusable Grammar Errors

Every now and again, I get on my rant about proper grammar STILL being important. It's a sign of education, refinement, professionalism, and attention to detail. No - I don't think it's everything.

I've often expressed my belief that skill at spelling (or lack thereof) is not an indicator of intelligence. And I suppose neither is grammar. But it is an indicator of your willingness to take the time to make things correct. Honestly, there's no excuse for poor grammar - because the rules are always the same. They don't change from day to day or week to week. And they make a LOT more sense than some of the complicated spellings of English words, whose rules have more exceptions than pretty much any other language.


The thing is, proper grammar is especially important in writing that gets posted for the public to see.

Huffington Post ran a piece on Thursday with images of funny uses of "random" quotation "marks." They inspired me to look for examples of my own pet peeves. Here, in no particular order, are some funny pictures of what I consider inexcusable grammar mistakes.

WARNING: These probably won't be all that funny to you if you're not something of a grammar nerd.

I'd like to get me some deep-fried Oreo's
at a place that's open 7 days, including Sunday's.



Or Oreos ... I mean, what's an apostrophe thrown in here and there?


These guys are also probably open 7 days, including Sundays!



Apostrophe before the R or after the R ...
what's the difference, really?


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You can tell its a great day when a dog wags it's tail.






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But it's going to be a bad day when
you're car won't start and your running late.



I would apologize for the F-bomb, but I can't because he/she is right!

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Me and John went to the U2 concert on Tuesday.


John and I sure screwed up this otherwise gorgeous picture, didn't we?

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Who can't Use a few good Random capital Letters?


Ye parents, beware the dangerous building sites!


OK, there's nothing technically wrong with this sign,
but it came up in my search for images of random capital
letters, and I just thought it was pretty damned funny.


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And it's "always" fun to throw in "random"
quotation "marks" any old place.


These are my favorites from the HuffPost piece mentioned above:


 Maybe it's meat service, maybe not.


So is it God we're thanking, or just someone who thinks they're God?


 Here we've got the apostrophe issue, a comma
rather than a period in a dollar amount, with two
incorrect uses of those random quotation marks.


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For answers to your questions about GRAMMAR, writing, editing, marketing, or design e-mail Laura or visit Write | Market | Design where we specialize in teaching our writers to think like marketers!
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5 comments:

  1. "So is it God we're thanking, or just someone who thinks THEY'RE God?" Use HE or SHE if you like; gender makes no difference, but if you're correcting grammar errors, pronoun-antecedent agreement does.

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  2. Great points, Laura! My favorite is the use of quote marks to emphasize. A newsletter editor once wrote that I was having a "free" event. Thinking there were substantial hidden costs, my peeps from that group avoided my truly free event. I told her, quotes in that context meant "so-called", but she still thought that she was emphasizing and that I was ungrateful. So I thought we were "friends".

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  3. Love that, Kebba - I thought we were "friends."

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  4. The "We are not a gay bar..." one infact does have a mistake in it. A number should always be spelled out if it's below ten; no matter what the number is, it should always be spelled out when starting a sentence.

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  5. Writing takes up quite a bit of time. If you have to send out many emails, reports, or other correspondences, you want them to be accurate and well written, but you don't want to spend your whole day going over everything, looking for corrections. See more grammar mistakes funny

    ReplyDelete