Please Remove That Space Before The Comma

• The Apostrophe Confusion: Your vs. You’re; It’s vs. Its; There vs. Their. The confusion comes from the fact that apostrophe can be used to show ownership as well as to denote contraction. Words like his, hers, its and theirs are possessive pronouns. They have possession built into them already, so they do not need apostrophes.

  The house over there is theirs, not yours.(no apostrophe in theirs or yours).

  Possessive forms of the pronoun ‘it’ does not use an apostrophe, while the verb contractions do use apostrophes.

  It’s a beautiful cat. Its hair is long and shiny.
  Whose cat is that? Who’s coming to pick it up?

  Contractions like they’re is often confused with their, and you’re is confused with the possessive your.
  

• Fused Sentences:
  

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  It is quite common to find two independent clauses joined without punctuation or a conjunction. An independent clause is a complete sentence, with both subject and verb. When connecting two independent clauses, some form of punctuation and/or a conjunction (and/while/but/because…) is required.

  The man walked along the road he felt tired. (incorrect)
  A Period required after ‘road’. So the corrected forms could be:
  The man walked along the road. He felt tired.
  The man walked along the road, and he felt tired.

  When the cars raced by we cheered it was an exciting race.
  Should be corrected as:
  We cheered when the cars raced by, and/as it was an exciting race.

• Dangling Modifiers
  Modifiers must be placed close to the term it modifies; if misplaced, they attach themselves to an entirely wrong subject and produce unintended, if hilarious, meanings.
  My hair stood on end after seeing a murder mystery.  (The verb ’seeing’ gets attached to ‘hair’)  should be corrected as:
  My hair stood on end after I saw a murder mystery.
  At the age of four, my mother taught me to read. (Should be corrected as ‘When I was aged four, my mother taught me to read.)

• Pairs of words that are often confused:

Lie/Lay:

Lie means to recline; lay means to put or place something. Lay is a transitive verb, meaning that there is always an object after it.
Lay the book on the shelf.                        ( Book is the object of the verb lay.)

The confusion occurs because ‘lay’ is the past tense form of ‘lie’. The simple past, continuous, and past perfect tenses of the pairs of words are:
lie: lie, lying, lay, (have) lain;
lay: lay, laying, laid, (have) laid

The following sentences illustrate the correct and incorrect uses of lay and lie.

I lie (not lay) on the bed when I listen to my favorite music. I lay on the bed while I listened to my favorite music.
I am lying [not laying] on the floor watching television. I am laying my briefcase on my desk.
Yesterday I lay in bed all day with a fever. Yesterday I laid my briefcase on my desk.

Affect/Effect: To affect some thing is to have some influence upon it. To effect some action is to cause it to happen.
I was affected by the stinging remarks of my friend. It had a strange effect on me.

Complement/Compliment:
If one thing complements another, then each of them completes the other, and the two together make a whole. In contrast, the word “compliment” is an observation of some good quality in a person.

Loose/Lose:
The word, “loose,” means something is not tight or securely fastened down. It might easily fall apart or fall off. The word “lose,” in contrast, means to have something go away and become lost.

• Count and Non-Count Nouns
  “Fewer” is used for counting while “less ” is used for measuring.
  You will not get a discount if you buy less than four of these items.        is wrong, and should read:
  You will not get a discount if you buy fewer than four of these items.
•  Joining a group of words as one word
  There is no such word as “inspite.” Make sure you use the two words separately, “in” and “spite.”
  It’s not ‘atleast’ but ‘at least’.
  Similarly, there is no word such as alot. You see this word used often, as in:
  I like her alot. It should be I like her a lot.

For Other Common Errors, Read

http://writinghood.com/style/grammar/to-capitalize-or-not-to-capitalize/

http://writinghood.com/style/grammar/to-hyphenate-or-not-to-hyphenate-a-head-spinning-question/

http://writinghood.com/style/grammar/subject-verb-agreement/

http://writinghood.com/style/how-to/fat-free-writing/

http://writinghood.com/writing/parallelism-in-good-writing/

http://writinghood.com/style/grammar/common-sense-rules-for-comma-usage/