I don’t know about you but I think many of todays adult population have an appalling command of the English language. Of course there are some who sadly cannot help their writing skills not being up to scratch because of dyslexia but there isn’t really an excuse for the rest of us, especially with proof-readers and spell-checking programs. I was reading a comment that somebody had written in response to a particular article of news on the Internet.  Instead of using the word ‘have’ they substituted it with ‘of’. This is symptomatic of the way people actually speak these days, they slur their words so that they sound like other words which, when written down, become the other word! For example they might say. ‘The policeman should have noticed the banana on the floor’ but write it thus:- ‘The policeman should of noticed the banana on the floor’. The word ‘have’ being so spoken as to sound like ‘of’ so when written it becomes that word!

Why do people get the words two, to and too confused? Most often the word ‘to’ is substituted for the word ‘too’ as in ‘He said it was to much for him to do’, when it should be, ‘He said it was too much for him to do’. Simple mistake if it is a mistake, which it probably isn’t most of the time. It is easy enough to remember which word to use in this case. Most applications require the use of the word ‘to’ but if an excess is implied then the word ‘too’ is correct because it has the extra ‘o’. There should be no excuse for mis-using the other word ‘two’.

Don’t people know that the letter ‘i’ is never used by itself? It should always be written as ‘I’. Or that the first letter of a name (proper nouns) should always be a capital letter as in John, London, Asia etc? Yet I see people writing all their words in lower-case with a complete disregard for the beginnings of sentences, proper nouns or quotations.

Then there are words such as ‘there’ and ‘their’, ‘where’ and ‘were’ which get people confused but they are not that difficult to understand. Remember ‘your’ is not the same as ‘you’re’, ‘our’ not the same as ‘are’.

There are many things in the writing of the English language that people get wrong. We all make mistakes but where there are writing aids I think they should be used and by doing so perhaps we can learn and improve as we go along. Be proud of your language and make every effort to improve your use of it.

I am of the opinion that many people just do not care about their language or their illiteracy, those that can do something about it that is. Standards are diminishing and it isn’t only in language, it is across the broad spectrum of life in many cases, in work, driving and in other things. 

Shirley Anne