20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes | LitReactor

20 Common Grammar Mistakes That (Almost) Everyone Makes | LitReactor

Why mechanics matter

A New York Times author bio reads: [her] "most recent article was about the young-adult novelist Suzanne Collins."

And if the Times hadn't cared, Collins (who is 47--young to me, but not to you) could have been described erroneously as the "young adult novelist."

Told ya this stuff was important!

Why Do I Have to Learn Punctuation?

After all, look at these rule-breakers in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!:

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all

and, later on, the protagonist's response:

"You cant understand it. You would have to be born there."

If Faulkner can break the rules, why can't I? Answer: He won the Nobel Prize for Literature; you didn't. (Just kidding.) Real answer: He knew the rules in order to know when to break them.

Neil Gaiman on Writing

"'For his seventh birthday, Gaiman received C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia series. He later recalled that "I admired his use of parenthetical statements to the reader, where he would just talk to you...I'd think, "Oh, my gosh, that is so cool! I want to do that! When I become an author, I want to be able to do things in parentheses." I liked the power of putting things in brackets.'"

(Biography Today. Detroit, Michigan: Omnigraphics. 2010. pp. 90–91. ISBN 978-0-7808-1058-7. Cited by Wikipedia, Neil Gaiman entry).

Great Grammar Guides

The Oatmeal.com takes on grammar with its typically twisted humor:

How to use apostrophes

How to use the semicolon

10 words you need to stop misspelling