Honestly people, I feel like the collective IQ of the average AG user is swiftly falling. I mean, just take a look at your grammar, people! You don't use capitals, punctuation, or even proper spelling. You don't bother to differentiate between homophones, you fail to add apostrophes where they are needed, and worst of all, you go to places like the WEPR forum and act intelligent, all the while using utterly mutilated grammar.
*deep breath*
Now that my rant is over, I will explain the purpose of this thread. I don't want to help you, let me make this clear, because anyone with even the most rudimentary of educations should have learned all of this long ago. But apparently, you are too lazy to utilize it, or maybe you really don't know it. Either way, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that it annoys me to no end. I hate it. I can't stand it. Whichever you'd prefer to call it, but either way, here's the deal. I have decided to make this thread, and have it contain corrections for many of the most commonly misused or misspelled words or phrase types. I am telling you now, taking a few extra seconds to use correct grammar will help you. Not only will it make your comments more coherent, it will make you seem less, well, stupid, raise others' respect for you, and to be clear,I can't take it anymore! Honestly people, it takes about a few seconds to take advantage of all those hours you spend in English class...so do it! Why do you think you go to school?
First of all, punctuation.
PUNCTUATION
The comma is our first subject. It's a handy little thing and can be located on the lower part of your keyboard, in between "m" and the period, which we will cover later. You see it? Great. A comma looks like this: ,. Commas are used to put a break in a sentence, or to combine two separate sentences. In the latter, they are usually accompanied by a word such as "and", "or", "but"...you get the picture.
Second of all is the apostrophe, which looks like this: '. It is located on the far right of your keyboard, in between the semicolon( and the enter key. In most cases, the apostrophe indicates ownership, for example the word "boy's" would mean that the boy in question owns the item following. An apostrophe after the "S", such as in "dogs'", indicates plural ownership, as in multiple dogs claim the following item. You might also see an apostrophe in a conjunction word, such as "it's"(I'll cover "it's" in more depth later on), which is simply a shortening of "it is".
Next up on our list is the period, which looks like this: .. It can be located on the lower left corner of your keyboard, in between the comma(,), and the question mark(?). The period is very important. It marks the end of a sentence, in a regular sentence. Other than that, however, it doesn't do much. Its use is fairly simple.
After the period comes the question mark, which looks like this: ? and is located at the bottom right of your keyboard, between the Shift key and the period. It, as well as the period, is the end of a sentence, but it is used as the end of an inquiry or question, hence its name. Otherwise,it doesn't do much.
Another thing you can use to mark the end of a sentence is an exclamation point, which looks like this: !. It is located in the upper left of your keyboard, and can be accessed using Shift and 1. It is used to mark a proclamation, passionate statement, or some sort of shout. Thus its name. It doesn't do anything else, really.
Up now we're covering the semicolon, which looks like this: ;, and is located in between the apostrophe and "L". It is used as a sentence combiner, as the beginning of a list, or in place of a colon. See; you're already using it! Or, I am, at least.
Next, we have the semicolon's cousin, the colon, which looks like this:. It is kind of hard to explain, but is used as indicatory. That's pretty much all there is to say on the colon, except that it is found in between the apostrophe and "L", accessible through the shift key.
Our last punctuation lesson is on the quotation marks, which look like this: ". They are very important, and are used to mark the beginning and end of speech. Like this:
"No way!" said Dude.
Don't forget that in dialogue(two people talking to each other, in case you didn't know), you need to use enter every time a new person is talking. You put the quotation mark at the beginning and ending of speech. Pretty easy to grasp, really.
CAPITALIZATION
Kind of ironic that in my title, I've broken one of the most basic rules of capitalization, that is to capitalize only the first letter of a word. A really simple rule to learn, really.
The next thing I'm going to teach you is to capitalize the beginning of every new sentence. Kind of like I've been doing this entire time, have you noticed that?
I know I'm going through these rather fast, but really, you should've learned all this a long time ago. Next thing you have to know is to capitalize proper nouns such as the name of a person or place, or the word "I". Do not capitalize pronouns, such as "he" or "she", or improper nouns, such as "dog" or "illow".
Capitalize the beginning of speech, that's important! And this lesson is really short, but honestly, how hard to get is all this stuff?
Capitalize titles such as "Dr.", or "Mrs.". Easy!
Capitalization was easy, wasn't it?
SPELLING
Obviously, I'm not going to teach you how to spell every word. You're just going to have to learn that yourself. Instead, I'm going to teach you the basic rules of spelling. I know that they're broken often, but the words that are most commonly misspelled can be remedied by use of these rules. The ones that break rules, well, you're just going to have to learn them like you should've already.
First, the "I" goes before the "E". Learn that, and stop saying things like "freind" or "beleive", and learn that it's actually supposed to be "friend" and "believe".
When making a word plural when said word ends with "Y" simply remove the "Y" and add "IES". Such as "enny" to "ennies" or "harmony" to "harmonies". Do not confuse this with the rule about words ending in "EY", in which case you would simply add an "S".
I know that my list of rules is very short, but I'm not going to list them all, and I am going to add to this guide from time to time.
I expect you all to read this guide and then forget about it, but at least I tried, eh? Honestly, people with bad grammar who try to act smart annoy me incessantly...until I have finally been annoyed enough, and have enough spare time, to make a guide like this that people will read and then discard immediately. Oh well.
-Moat
