By Gord Tep

I’m actually putting this out there as a service of sorts. These common occurrences on Facebook make me cringe because they’re sending out an unflattering message concerning your intellect:

• not knowing the difference between your & you’re
• not knowing the difference between they’re, there, & their
• not knowing the difference between to, too, & two
• not knowing the difference between then & than
• not knowing the difference between who’s & whose
• not knowing the difference between it’s & its
• not knowing the difference between wholly & holy
• not knowing when to use “me” instead of “I”
• not knowing when to use “myself” or “yourself”
• not knowing when to use “he” instead of “him” or “she” instead of “her”
• not knowing that “a lot” is two words
• not knowing what contractions and possessives are (apostrophes)
• putting an extra E in judgment
• putting the dollar sign after the amount
• using fake words like “supposively” instead of “supposedly”
• using fake phrases like “should of” instead of “should have”
• using fake phrases like “based off” instead of “based on”
• being a teacher and still making these errors
• trying to correct people when they already had it right (this one is insane)

Oy vey iz mir

The occasional typo is normal. I’m not talking about that, nor am I talking about perfectly acceptable cell phone abbreviations. I think all of these types of errors are indicative of someone who just doesn’t read. You see it a lot with the confusion of various words/phrases that people have clearly heard and never seen in writing. An example would be writing something like “for all intensive purposes” instead of “for all intents and purposes.” There are dozens of these, but that’s just one that came to mind.

I know it’s just Facebook, and you don’t have to use perfect grammar. Most of us type in all lowercase all the time, and that’s fine for informal e-writing. However, the types of errors I’m identifying are the ones that announce your lack of language skills to the world. I’m not even nitpicking here about misusing (or failing to use) commas, and things of that nature, which might even be debatable depending on how you were taught or what writing style you’re using. If you work on learning the basic items on this list, you’ll avoid sounding uneducated.

Gord is a self-professed creative genius, but he actually makes mistakes all the time.