Grammar Giggle – Start Contrast

More material from “Breaking News” stories from my local news station. When you’re talking about something that is very different from something else, it should be in stark contrast to. They just got that all wrong and it was how the story started.

Grammar Giggle – Seeing Machine

Facebook Marketplace is a plethora of content for Grammar Giggles. Please understand that I am not making fun of people for making mistakes, I’m using those mistakes as a teaching mechanism for proofreading E V E R Y T H I N G! That said, I found this on Facebook Marketplace recently. I understand that the “e” and the “w” are right next to each other on the keyboard, but can we at least look at what we are posting before we actually hit “post”? Or at least edit it afterward if we notice it later?

Grammar Giggle – His’ Apartment

This was a local news story and although I feared the apostrophe in “his” was something on my phone, it was not. And then I found the second error. Tucson, Arizona, is spelled “T U C S O N,” although it is frequently misspelled. But for an Arizona news station to misspell it–in the same article that they added an apostrophe to “his”–is inexcusable. “His” doesn’t need an apostrophe because the word itself means that it belongs to him so there is no other possessive for HIS apartment.

Grammar Giggle – Calender?

We recently had a sales pitch for a new docketing/calendaring program when I caught this one. At first, I thought maybe it was an intentional misspelling that had something to do with a trademark, but, alas, when I went to the website, “calendar” was spelled correctly, so it was just the pitch that was misspelled. I see a lot of errors in PowerPoint presentations and other presentation materials. That is one where it is really important to have other people proofread it since you know what it is supposed to say, so you “see” it that way, but someone else might not. In any event, it is important to proofread your presentation materials–both visual and your handouts.

Grammar Giggle – Wither Is Not The Same As Either

This was in my “breaking news” stories recently. It took me a while, but I think they wanted to say “either” of the kids and slipped one finger to the left. Again, “wither” is a real word, so spell check wouldn’t catch it, so you need to actually read the text (or have someone else do it) to make sure things are correct.