Meg's Grammar and Spelling AAAARRGH! Page

These are a few things that are really starting to bother me. Most of them can be resolved through the simple use of a dictionary, or some basic proofreading. The fact that in many cases, they have not been, does tend to irritate me. So, here's a few things to keep an eye on.

The Apostrophe

This definitely seems to be a case of "the opposite of an error is the opposite error". Some people put apostrophes everywhere, some people appear to be allergic to the silly things. So here are the basics:

1) Possessives:

A possesive apostrophe indicates ownership. For example:

The man has a face. It is the man's face.

If in doubt, see whether you can rephrase the statement to say who owns what, thusly:

The man owns the face.

Then think of the possessive apostrophe as being a shorthand for the words "owns the".

Please note: its, theirs, his, hers and yours do not need possessive apostrophes, as they are possessive pronouns.

2) Contractions:

Where you contract two words into one smaller word (such as "I am" becoming "I'm") you should indicate that letters have been removed.

Where in doubt, write out all of the words you want to use. Then contract as needed.

3) Where apostrophes don't belong:

Fresh peache's for sale. Fresh plum's for sale.

This is an example of what is called the "greengrocer's apostrophe". This is an apostrophe which is put in at the end of the plural form of a word before the "s". It results from a confusion of plural forms with posessive forms. Remember, if you are talking about more than one of an object, this is the plural. If you are talking about who owns an object, this is the posessive. If you are talking about who owns a group of objects, remember, the apostrophe goes to indicate who does the owning, not what is owned.

Mis-spelled words.

This is a quick list of some that I've run into on my travels through fanfiction. If one of yours is in here, and you want me to explain further, let me know - I'll put in an explanation. I'm sure that some of these are merely typographical errors. This is why a good beta reader is a good thing. So is sounding out the word, to ensure that you've got all the syllables in there.

stroad	strode (past tense of the verb "to stride")
acsess	access
whisps	wisps
lept	leapt (past tense of the verb "to leap")
britches	breeches (this is one of those weird ones in English)
mearly	merely
breath taking	breathtaking (one word, not two)
speach	speech (noun form. The verb is "to speak")
freeded	freed (the past tense of the verb "to free")
irriatance	irritance
aphrodesiac	aphrodisiac (from the name of the goddess "Aphrodite")
pschopathic	psychopathic
admonistised	admonished
seized	siezed
persived	perceived
lets	let's ("let us", contracted)
akward	awkward
bekonded	beckoned
invisable	invisible (antonymic form of "visible", the adjectival form of "vision")
fasination	fascination
debators	debaters
pschological	psychological
intermitten	intermittent (although from context, it really should be "interspersed")
aggrived	aggrieved
definately	definitely (adverbal form of "definite")
iniative	initiative
irriating	irritating
embarressing	embarrassing
uncermoniously	unceremoniously
conciousness	consciousness
scacastic	sarcastic (adjectival form of "sarcasm")
persistant	persistent (past tense or adjectival form of "persist")

Tricky Homonyms and Homophones:

This is where I'm going to put all the lovely little groups of words which people seem to be muddling.

your	Belonging to you. Possessive pronoun, no apostrophe needed
you're	Contraction of "you are". Note apostrophe.

there	A place or location
their	Belonging to them.
they're	Contraction of "they are". Note apostrophe.

its	Belonging to it. Posessive pronoun, no apostrophe needed.
it's	Contraction of "it is". Note apostrophe.

course	The path of a river, or a path of study
cause	The reason for something
coarse	Not fine

drought	Lack of rain
draught	A beverage, or an unwelcome body of air.

complement	The other half of, something that is opposite to something else.
Compliment	An expression of praise, freely given.

Big No-Nos.

Use these persistently, and mark yourself as someone who is barely literate.

1. "yous" or "youze" - You is the second person pronoun. As such, it is both singular and plural at the same time. Rather like the word "sheep". Speaking of which, if you mean a large number of female sheep, it's "ewes".

2. Floor" rather than "ground". The ground is what the floor is placed over, so that people don't have to get dirt in their food.

Speech Rules:

1. Speech, even unvoiced speech, goes in quotes. This differentiates it from the rest of what you're writing.

2. Start at the beginning," he said, "go on until the end, then stop."
   "Ah, it's easy!" Alice exclaimed.

Please note where the punctuation goes in all of that:

• There is a comma after the end of the first clause, and before the quote marks.

• The indication of who was speaking does not begin with a capital letter unless you are using a proper noun.
• If the indication of who is speaking is an interjection (or interruption) in the flow of the speech, then this is followed by a comma outside the quotation marks, and the speech picks up without a capital unless there is a proper noun being used.
• When the sentence ends, the full stop is inside the quotation marks.
• Necessary exceptions are that if speech ends with a question mark or exclamation mark, you do not need a comma.
• Each new speaker starts their speech on a new line.

Parts of speech

1) Nouns are naming words. They name an object, a concept, or a person. Nouns that are the name of a location, a person, or a particular object or title are proper nouns. Proper nouns are always capitalised. To tell whether a noun is a proper noun, try the following test: an item named by a proper noun will also have a standard noun which can be used to name it.

For example:

Meg is a woman.
The Star of India is a sapphire.
Canberra is a city.

2) Verbs are doing words. They ascribe an action to a noun. Verbs are not capitalised save at the beginning of a sentence. If you're unsure whether a word is a verb or not, remember that the verb form of any word can be placed into a sentence with the word "to". For example: "to run"; "to fall"; "to jump"; "to weigh".

3) Adjectives are words which describe nouns. This is where things start getting complex. For example, "beauty" is a noun, as it names a concept. Yet "beautiful" is an adjective, for it is assigning that concept to an object. Adjectives are very rarely used without reference to the noun that they are describing.

4) Adverbs are words which describe verbs. They give a quality of intensity to an action. Most adverbs end with the suffix -ly. For example: quickly; heartily; anxiously. Again, adverbs are rarely used without reference to the verb that they are describing. Try to avoid adverbs in your writing wherever possible – make the verb do all the work.

5) Pronouns are words which assign ownership. Words such as "mine", "yours", "I", "you", "them" are all pronouns. When used in a sentence, they point to which items or which actions belong to which characters in the sentence.

Awkward bits and pieces

Subject/verb agreement -

This is one that I trip over myself on a regular basis. The basic premise here is that the actions of the subject of a sentence should all occur in the same time frame. If you are speaking about actions which are being performed now, you have to speak in the present tense. If you speak of actions which have already occurred, you must speak in the past tense. If you are to speak of actions which will occur in the future, you need to speak in the future tense.

So, for example:

Present tense:	I am weighing the gold.
Past tense:	I have weighed the gold.
Future tense:	I will weigh the gold.

Possessives, part the second:

Who owns what in this sentence?

"He felt his hand, palm down firmly against the flesh between his shoulders."

This is why it is a good idea to use proper nouns to identify participants in a sentence where you have more than one participant of the same gender identity mentioned. Otherwise, it can rapidly become difficult to identify which person is doing what to whom and how often.

Noun and verb forms of words -

Noun	Verb
weight	to weigh
speech	to speak
grief	to grieve

Anachronism, and why mediaeval characters wouldn't use the term "species":

Words have an age, much like everything else. Some terms that are reasonably common in our everyday English are actually former jargon terms from various professions, others are new words which have been created for specific purposes. If you're going to use a term in an archaic setting, first check that this term would have been appropriate to the time you're setting it in.

Oh, and the same runs in reverse for futuristic settings - "thees" and "thous" tend to sound a bit clunky when used by people in cyberspace.

Possessives, part the third:

This isn't so much about who owns things as what cannot own things. For example:

"Boromir released the elf, and took a few steps back, random violence sated."

The sentence above doesn't really work, because it's missing a few words. It implies that "random violence" is something which can be sated - which it isn't. A desire for random violence can be sated, and that's what should have been written into the sentence. The moral being that there is a difference between the person doing the desiring, the desire in question, and the object of the desire.

Adjective forms:

Some words (particularly racial or species names) have a different form when describing the attribute of belonging to or being performed by a particular member of that group. Here are some examples:

elf	elven
dwarf	dwarven
cow	bovine
sheep	ovine