Mid-Week Morning Thoughts: You're, Yours and Mines?

                                                                         Source: someecards.com via Amanda on Pinterest

grammar:. It's what we learned in second grade while practicing our cursive on those gray, midway-dotted lined, handwriting-practice sheets... or at least back in the day when I was seven, I did that.

Nowadays in a world of "tech-savvy" toddlers and eight year olds who have cell phones (remind me why they need to text their friend-who-still-eats-glue?), let's just say online and virtual-speak does not always condone proper grammar usage. As a result, casual texts and emails with misspellings, lack of punctuation and of course, silly grammar errors become habitual. Now, we hardly notice these mistakes anymore. #embarrassing

Common Mistakes: 

• punctuation: oxford commas and use of semicolons
• misspelling contractions or possessive pronouns: it's vs. its and you're vs. your
• spelling, in general
• For my AP style writers: abiding by the holy grail of writing... don't worry, we all still make those mistakes. I keep a copy at my desk at work, one on my bookshelf at home and another via Blackberry app.

Sometimes, we forget that spellcheck isn't magic. Yes, friends... it could replace some precious words with not-so-appropriate ones - sort of like "Autocorrect" on your iPhone, which we really don't need to get into that. I'm sure you're all quite familiar with "messages gone wrong," which brings me to my main point.

                                                                             Infographic Source: art.com via Amanda on Pinterest

A popular "pin" on my "Tech it Easy; I'm a big Geeky" board.

Grammar and punctuation. It's really not that difficult to go back and double-check your message before you hit that lovely button:"send." Check your spelling and punctuation before you consider that you're done with the project.

It's simple. We did it when we were seven.