Nowadays English is a globally spread language that dominates in business and entertainment, and which is also the main one found on the Internet. People start learning English not because they like it so much, but out of the necessity to remain compatible on the job market. Your resume may be extraordinarily full, but without this language competence you are very unlikely to find a well-paid job. Writing your CV in English may also prove to be a challenge.
Writing is always difficult, the mistakes cannot be avoided. There are, however some mistakes that you make more often, they are typical for you. And there also such mistakes which are typical for everyone and no one can boast of not having made one. This can be applied both to the native speakers and to those who learn English as a second, third or fourth language. Due to the fact that learning any language is far from easy, you must remain lenient and do not judge yourself very strictly when you misspell a word or use the wrong grammatical tense, but work hard so that this mistake never repeats itself. Whenever you are unsure of your choice of words and grammar, you may turn to the professionals and get much useful advice, have your resume proofread and edited.
When you learn a language, you must remember that its grammar is like its soul: the language cannot exist without its rules. You must learn at least basic of them by heart and then you would be ready to go on the journey called “language learning”. You may make your studies more fun if you set a goal to learn something by the next April, 4 – the National Grammar Day.
Here We “Slip” Most Often
You may have read the lists of frequently misspelt words online. Those are often very long. Here is a shortened version, which will help you get started on fixing your mishaps and perfecting you writing.
Here we go:
1. The first and most common mistake is writing „its“ instead of „it’s“. These two can be confused in oral conversation because no one sees how you think, but in written English it is very important no to mix them up. You must remember, that “its” is a possessive pronoun while “it’s” is just a short form from “it is”. The common advice is to write everything in full form in order to avoid this confusion.
2. “There” and “their” are also very often confused, but they also have a triplet “they’re” – and all three sound the same. The trick is in the grammatical outlay of the sentence. After pronoun “there” always comes a verb, it is usually “is” or “are”. But it can also be at the end of a sentence, used as an adverb of place. “Their” as a possessive adjective can never be used without a following noun, so you must look whether or not you have a noun after your confused word. And, finally, «they’re” is nothing else but another shortening. You must see in this case if “they are” fits in.
3. There is a small grammatical fellow that makes huge difference and tends to be misplaced very often. We call it an apostrophe. Due to the fact that an apostrophe helps us to form a possessive case of a noun together with “s”, it is also very often used for the formation of a plural form. This is a widely spread mistake that spoils most essays of the students. You must remember never to use an apostrophe for plural formation ever again and it would be enough to avoid eighty percent of mistakes, the other twenty percent come from the doubt of whether the apostrophe should be before “s” or after it. Remember, when you talk about a thing that belong to one person, the apostrophe comes before “s”, but when this thing belongs to more than one person, you must write it after “s”. However, there is one little exception, for the irregular or foreign plurals we must apply the same rule as for the singular possession.
4. “You’re” and “your” are another pair of twins pronounced similarly but written the same. To find the correct answer, you must decide whether you need a possessive pronoun “your”, or a sentence structure “you are”, because the latter is “you’re” in short. This can be applied to many more shortenings in English language, which is why, once again, it is much safer to write full forms if you are not too sure about the brief version.
5. Among many other common grammatical mistakes we may also find that people often confuse countable and uncountable nouns, thus the misuse of “few”, “little”, “much”, “many”, “amount” and “number”. “Few”, “many” and “number” are used with those nouns which can be counted, and they are naturally in their plural form, so we can say the exact number of them. At the same time if you have an uncountable noun that has no plural form, you naturally use “little”, “much” or “amount”. These are not so difficult to remember; more difficult is to learn which nouns are uncountable.
If we are going to be perfectly honest, then you should know that there are many common mistakes made in written English, some are more frequent, while the others happen once in a blue moon. We may learn ten, but find another twenty. The thing is: English needs to be constantly perfected, updated and kept up with. Not even a native speaker can boast that they have learned the language perfectly, because with all its tricks and turns it is very complex and intricate, though so simple at the first sight. We would be really happy to learn about your most common mistake and how you learn to correct them. If you are interested in sharing, please contact us. But if you need help proofreading you written assignment, our team is always ready to help and guide you to a perfect grade.