Ex: Instead of saying dead or died, the phrase that it polite and less offensive is passed away or no longer with us.

Source: Technical Communications Textbook

Oftentimes people confuse these words which completely changes the meaning of a sentence.

For example, it is wrong to say "Your going to love this movie!" It should be "You're going to love this movie!"

For example, in "When Alex met Jordan, he was nervous," it's unclear who "he" refers to. It's clearer to say, "When Alex met Jordan, Alex was nervous."

In technical writing, such confusion can hurt professionalism and readability.

For example, CitiBank flagged operational anomalies within the digital banking platform; we must execute remediation protocols and provide a stakeholder update.

All they had to say was, CitiBank reported problems with online banking. We need to fix the issue and update the clients.

It is important to consider the cultural context of your readers because each culture has different style preferences, cultural references, and attitudes regarding key words/phrases that writers must take into account to ensure an optimal reading experience.

A grammar error I find incredibly annoying is when people write blocks of text while completely omitting any meaningful punctuation. There may be a period here or there, but the whole paragraph is practically incomprehensible because much-needed commas are missing. This is mostly a problem specific to social media, but it is irritating regardless.

Examples of wrong usage:

"Everyone said its going to be freezing."

"The fox is eating it's dinner."

You can't tell they're written wrong when said out loud, but it's noticeable when written down.

"It's"- a contraction for "it is", meaning you're referring to the way something IS.

Example: "It's going to be cold today." (can be read as: "It is going to be cold today.")

"Its"- a possessive pronoun referring to ownership/possession.

Example: "The cat is going to use its blanket to stay warm." ("its" is referring to the blanket which belongs to the cat.)

An easy way to avoid misuse is simply to read the word "it's" as "it is" to make sure you're using the right word!

Although the mix up between quiet and quite had me confused when I was growing up.

For example: "my room is quiet", and "my room is quite the mess".

Another grammatical error I see a lot in social media is: ALOT

It is 2 separate words: A and LOT

It's an amount of something, so it's like saying its "aton" instead of "A ton".

• They're - They are, just read it that way that is as simple as possible,

  -Example: They're eating strawberry ice-cream.

• Their- the I helps me remember that it's talking about someone

  -Example -That is their strawberry ice cream.

• There - this one would be the only one left which means position or place I usually just point somewhere and say the word there. It's over there

  -Example- The strawberry ice cream is over there.

-"For all intensive purposes" for "For all intents and purposes".

- "Nip it in the butt" for "Nip it in the bud"

- "I could care less" for "I couldn't care less"

-"Irregardless" for "regardless"

It's funny seeing all the grammar correction recommendations on this post for the misuse of these phrases.

When grown adults mix up homophones, (your, you're is another one), it just drives me nuts for some reason. Maybe because it was just pounded into my head by my elementary school teacher. Otherwise, this chapter reminded me that I am not perfect, and can work more on making things more concise.

The other day, I saw a comment on a platform I frequent use the informal contraction of "kind've". I don't see it as often, so I did a double take. The sentence was something along the lines of, "I kind've wish (some character) would make an apppearance again..." Obviously if you read it aloud it makes sense, but it just looks so odd because the ending of 've means have. It just kind of stuck with me. :/