What overly common grammatical errors make you want to tear your hair out the most?

why do you care that alot s not a word... it is a word... i use it. alot. therefore. it is.

 

My worst habit is putting the punctuation "INSIDE." the quotes instead of putting the
punctuation "OUTSIDE" of the quote. See the difference?

 

My grammar is HORRIBLE for a person who just graduated with a B.A. in English! But I have good reason for this...it's because I am from Kentucky and am one of the first classes to go through K-12 under KERA (Kentucky Education Reform Act). Going to public school under KERA truly fucked me up.

For one thing, in 2nd grade, every Thursday we watched Reading Rainbow in my reading class during my group work time. Because of that, my group and I were a great deal behind the rest of the class. When the end of the year came up, rather than test me on what I knew, they just assumed I couldn't read and started taking me out of math class and grammar class to teach me how to read. So, now my grammar skills and math skills are very poor. They did that until I was in 6th grade against my mothers permission. She had come to the school and told them she knew I could read because that's all I did at home (and why would a 2nd grader hold a book for hours if they weren't reading???). But hey, my comprehension is off the charts!!!!

Though, I don't know how much better my grammar would have been had I not been taken out of class. During elementary school, grammar was still part of the curriculum. But somewhere in there grammar was actually REMOVED from the curriculum. Yes, that's right folks, as of right now in Kentucky, not one English teacher is required to teach grammar in public school. In fact, for the past decade, all they have been teaching children here is to write. Write what you feel. But, don't worry about that period or that comma, it's not really all that important! (don't think it's just the english curriculum. My husband is a high school chemistry teacher, and I'll have you know that the freaking Periodic Table isn't even on the curriculum for chemistry).

I have a feeling it's about to change though. KERA has been in place for about 2 decades now. And well, as much as they want to put KERA in education books and teach it in college education classes as being some wonderful education reform, it's piss poor. If it was so wonderful, don't you think that Kentucky's educational rank in the nation would be just a bit higher??? So, if any of you out there are Education majors and you ever happen to come across KERA in one of your education books, tell your teacher about the fact that grammar isn't on the english curriculum and the periodic table isn't on the chemistry curriculum, and that KY is ranked 37 in the nation!!!

It's the college professors that will do something about it, IMO. They got frustrated with me, and I was lucky. I managed to learn a little grammar. When all their 101 students come in with no grammar skills what so ever, they will all have a hissy. I tried to explain this to my professors many times. It was really starting to get bad my last few years in college, all I heard was professors complaining about the lack of correct writing skills in their new students.

At my university, you couldn't take grammar until you had taken ENG 101, 102, and 310, all the writing classes? Whey does writing come before grammar??? 310 was advanced college writing and it was a pre-req to grammar. And what they taught me in my college grammar class, a senior level class, was all foriegn to me, I retained none of it, yet still managed to pull an A in the class. All of my grammar skills come from reading book after book after book, not from a teacher.

I've helped grade high school papers. I went through the education program at my university for a few years before I became too jaded with the Kentucky public school system and the politics and decided not to be a teacher. What I saw was very scary. Seniors who have no understanding of punctuation or how to build sentences. Numerous words spelled incorrectly. Some seniors in high school can't even read??? It makes no sense to me how they became seniors. I observed one freshmen class who was reading Romeo and Juliet. Well, they weren't reading it, the teacher was playing a tape in class while they sat and listened. Not even a text infront of them. Rather than have any discusson about the play, they made masks. I wanted to pully my hair out and ask the administration why they are paying a teacher not to teach!

Now, don't get me wrong. Not all parts of Kentucky are that bad. In fact, we do actually have some wonderful schools. This problem is mostly seen in poverty stricken areas, which happens to be most of the hills of Kentucky. Teachers don't want to teach in areas that get snowed in by a dusting, where you can't get your students to take homework home. My husband taught in a district in the Appalachian hills (where the kids were listening to R&J) and parents would literally take their children out of school for weeks to go hunting (though not all the students HAD to hunt for their livelyhood, some maybe, but not all). Then come back and get mad at him for failing those students, actually told him that they would not allow him to give them homework. He was lucky to have one parent show up to parent conferences or for open house. He could not assign homework because none of his students would do it, in many cases he was their only teacher who attempted to. He had to set aside class time for homework and hound them to make sure they did it then. During the winter, that school district would miss 30 or more days a year due to snow...most of the time only a dusting. How children are suppossed to learn when they don't go to school for weeks at a time, I don't know. Oh, the system in some places here is just awful!

I don't think the internet helps. It seems to me that in chat rooms and bulletin boards, people really just don't give a flying f about grammar. It bugs me to death, I have to write out sentences. I'm not one to use internet lingo at all, if I do, it's rarely. With so many people using this medium though, I have a feeling that the consistant grammar mistakes will take root and become part of the writer's bad habits else where in their writing.

 

Some of my pet peeves:

"saw" used for "seen" and vice versa
Correct: I saw her standing there.
Have you ever seen a man with purple hair?

object pronouns used for subject pronouns
Incorrect: Me and her seen you.
Correct: She and I saw you.

Yes, I realize this last example illustrates both of those errors, but it's typical of what I find most irritating.

an unnecessary "at"
Incorrect: Where are you at?
Correct: Where are you?

 

I hate it when people use apostrophes in the wrong places. I drive by the video store and see "DVD's" in the window. Also when people talk about the 60s. If the apostrophe goes anywhere, it's BEFORE 60, not after.

 

I have horrible grammer out of sheer laziness.......

I apoligize for making y'all crazy, it's just how I write, it conveys my manner of speach.....

sorry...

 

^

Sometimes I use bad grammar on purpose, coz people with 100% perfect grammar can come across sounding like tight asses.

Example:
"Why don't you just shut up, bitch?" <- tight ass
"Why dont y'all just shutup biatch!" <- ok

 

I used to be a stickler for grammar and spelling. There's not really much point in getting so bothered by it nowadays, especially when we have email and text messaging.

 

How about this: has anyone noticed that the name of this forum "Writers" COULD be wrong? I'm not sure if it is, but it COULD be. It could be writer's (belonging to one writer), writers' (belonging to lots of writers), or writers (a forum consisting of writers). I wonder what the they...no, the moderator(s) mean?

 

I think these mistakes are made because people don't think about what they're really saying when they speak. It is very annoying.

 

E.B.White (Elements of Style) once said something to the effect that writers should never let a grammatical rule get in the way of a good sentence. Good writers earn the right to deviate from the norm when the need arises.

"Who'da thunk it?" to express surprise is one example (and there are many other better ones, too.)

 

Periods and commas always go inside quotation marks. Others that are used for inflection (such as ? and !) go inside or outside depending whether they are part of the quoted text.

John asked, "Have you seen the new Star Wars movie?"

Did you agree with John when he said, "all Star Wars movies suck"?

 

irregardless....... I despise that non word

seen instead of saw. I seen you at the store this morning. How many times...?
orientated.......what is wrong with oriented?
I actually don't really react much at all, but I notice it.
I dislike Bush's pronunciation of nuclear...... nuke-yuh-ler
And wonder why comfortable is usually spoken comfterble.
Broughten seems to be the new word for brang and brung.
Boughten is sometimes heard too.
I guess the word gotten has had offspring.
My latest blunder was spelling liar lier....but at 40 I learned how to spell it right.
And the butcher jobs I see trying to write archeopteryx, hors d'oeuvre, and electroencephalograph are so discombobulating, I find.

 

I hate grammar.

Lalalalala

diagraming sentances!

 

I alwasy die when people use "affect" and "effect" wrong. My Bio teacher last semester did it constantly and I'm totally neurotic that way but she was so nice so I just sat silently while inside I almost had a heart attack

Also- When people spell "lose" as "loose"! Arg! Ugh this drives me nuts!

Wait...are these grammatical? Oh well...

 

Thats spelling.

 

Ahahaha...I hate that, too. My journalism teacher got onto my all the time about that because my English teachers have always taught me to use the former.

Other people's grammar doesn't bother me. It's my own. For instance, I can't write a sentence without using capital letters. I've tried a few times, just to relinquish some of my uptightedness about it all, but it never lasts.

Actually, I take that back. I knew a kid last year that asked me if I "got" any gum. Like, 10 times in one day. It killed me. And when people misspell sentence.

There are a lot of grammar points that I've never gotten cleared up. There's so many rules that I just use what feels right in a sentence.

 

I hate all grammatical errors, particularly when it results in an incomplete or incorrectly worded sentence.

 

I have also been working as a TA but with ASD kids - I could read at 3 years. I know I was advanced but I wasn't the only one. Yet, my friend's 6 year old couldn't read last time I saw her. Parents aren't reading with kids anymore because there are channels on TV to shove them in front of. I know a 19 year old who was in private paid for school from Infants through to 6th form and he can't write, spell or anything for SHIT. It angers me.

I hate kids using text speak. A few years ago they debated allowing it to be used in GCSE exams because so many kids did use it. Twats.

I am a bit of a pedant, but maybebecause it always angered me that I wasn't in the top sets yet I could spell and none of the top set students could. Everywhere I go, there are signs and such with wrong spellings on, bad grammar and such, that DO NOT make sense. It makes me cross. Why do companies let people take out ads for them and put up advert signs with bad spellings on? Baguette isn't baugette, damn that stupid shop in Reading.