Four Grammar Mistakes That Make You Look Like an Idiot

It’s vs. Its

Really you should have learned the difference about when you learned contractions, but too many careless people/idiots get this wrong all the time. They use “it’s” when the possessive situation demands “its”.

• “It’s” is a contraction for “it is”.
• The correct possessive term for “it” is “its”.

Could/would/should of vs. Could/would/should have

Another hopelessly obvious mistake that borders on retardation. We know about “could have”, “would have”, and “should have”, and their contractions “could’ve”, “would’ve”, and “should’ve”. Those are correct. Apparently some fool saw that the contractions sounded similar to “could of”, “would of”, and “should of”, and decided that they mean the same thing.

• “Could’ve” means “could have”, “would’ve” means “would have”, and “should’ve” means “should have”.
• “Could”, “would”, or “should” followed by “of” sounds the same as the respective contraction but DOES NOT mean the same thing!!

Effect vs. Affect

As a rule of thumb:

• Effect is a noun.
• Affect is a verb.

Too often people use “effect” as a verb, and vice-versa sometimes.

List item one, item two(,) and item three

• In a list with three or more items, a comma must go between each item. The last item is preceded by an “and”. Example: “I own a dog, a cat, and a mouse.”
• The items in a list of two are separated by “and”, without commas. Example: “I own a dog and a cat.”
• Combine similar items in a list. Lists can be nested in larger lists and count as one item in the list. Example: “Make sure you clear the table, wash and dry the dishes, and turn off the TV, computer, and lights before you go to bed.” Washing and drying the dishes can be grouped. So can the TV, computer, and lights. The latter is a list of three nested as the third item in the overall list.

The first point is where most go wrong. More specifically, quite often in low-quality writing like advertisements and some newspapers, the last comma is omitted so that the list ends up like “shirt, pants and socks” (in this case pants and socks aren’t being combined).  It’s such a common misconception that the incorrect way shows up more than the correct style. This snowball effect (not affect) leads more to believe that the wrong way is right.