English Grammar Mistakes

Top Ten Common English Grammar mistakes

10. Who, which or that?

“Who” or “whom” is used for persons, whereas “which” refers to animals or things and never to persons while “that” can refer to either persons or things.
Some Examples of correct usage are given here:

The girl who was on a diet.
The dog which bit the little boy.
The train that goes to Karachi.

9. Anyone vs any one

This one is again a very common mistake, if this confuses you then you must understand this: “Anyone” means “any person,” not particularly a specific person or It could even refer to multiple people at the same time.

As there are two words in “any one” these refer to a single person.

Some sentence examples are given below:
Anyone can operate my software. However a single-user software license can only be utilized by any one user at one time.

8. Commonly misspelled words

All right, as you may have seen people saying ALRIGHT.

Dependable
Recommend

Independent
Responsible
Separate

7. Most people don’t put punctuation at the end of a URL

This one is not technically an English grammatical error but rather an internet grammatical rule as when you don’t put a period or anything after a URL reference it will usually invalidate the URL. So place the punctuation immediately after the closing anchor tag of the link.

6. Software not softwares

“Software” is both singular and plural hence it must never be used as “softwares.”

5. Do the quotes go after or before the period?

According to US English standard you must put quotation marks after a period or comma. Put quotes after a question mark unless the entire sentence is a question. Put quotes before a colon. British English usage can differ.
Some sentence examples are:
He inquired, “Are you ill?”
She answered, “Yes.”
Did she say, “Yes”?

4. There, their, or they’re

If you are a grammar nazi this one error on the internet might have caused you enough torment. “There” is used in two ways i.e. to specify a place or as an expletive or empty word to start a sentence.

Whereas “their” is used as a possessive form of “they.”

And “they’re” is a short form for “they are.”

Some sentence examples are given:
There are twenty houses in this street.
The three boys raced their cars.
They’re tired after hiking.

3. Overuse of Powerful

This can be seen frequently on the internet where too many developers describe their software as, “XXX Software is powerful.” This word powerful has various meanings, and mostly refers to how effectively something is performed. E.g. a car with 400 horsepower is clearly more powerful when compared with only 200 horsepower. But what bugs me is that what is powerful software? If you want to describe it as feature-rich (like Adobe Photoshop), then say so. If it does just one thing, but completely or thoroughly (like CounterSpy), then say so but kindly, no more powerful software.

2. Site or sight

A “site” is a place/location whereas “sight” refers to the sense of vision; never to a web site.

Some sentence examples are given here:
A web site on the internet is a place that you visit with your internet browser.
A sunset is a breathtaking sight.

1. Its or It’s

This is the commonest error by English authors, for them lets clarify the possessive form of “it” is “its,” not “it’s.” So you must use “it’s” only when it means “it is.” If you cannot replace “it’s” with “it is,” use “its.” But never use “its’.”

Some sentence examples are given below:

It’s hailing here.

The dog licked its paw.