If you are or have ever wanted to be a blogger, you’ve probably heard of WordPress. Even though WordPress has expanded from being just a blogging platform, many still use it to build their own blog.
WordPress bloggers upload 70.5 million new posts each month. WordPress pages get 21.1 billion views each month. The numbers are nothing short of impressive.
We obviously don’t have the time to inspect all of these pages. Still, we have visited many WordPress blogs, and we have seen our fair share of grammar mistakes. Let us assure you, these happen to both professional bloggers and complete beginners alike.
It’s one thing to have an error slip by. It happens to everyone. However, you can’t afford to make the same mistake time after time whether it’s a misspelling or wrong sentence structure.
If you’re a blogger, most of your content is typically text. If there are grammatical errors in your writing, readability is affected and users perceive you as unprofessional at best.
Considering that, we bring you the 7 most common grammatical mistakes among bloggers. Pay attention to these in your writing even if you’re already a top blogger or a professional writer.
Wrong Tense
This is a big one. If you make any of the other mistakes, readers can usually get your meaning from the context. If you put a verb in the wrong tense, however, it easily changes the meaning of the entire sentence.
Unfortunately, wrong verb tense is a rather common grammatical error. It really pays off to work hard on getting the tenses right. Pay special attention to conditional sentences—this is where many mistakes in tense occur.
Subject-Verb Disagreement
This error is a fast way to get on your audience’s bad side. The verb form has to agree with its subject.
You probably won’t make the mistake of writing “we is,” but it’s much easier to make a mistake in a more complicated sentence. For instance, writing “Showing virtues of the programs have earned us increased funding,” would be a mistake.
“Programs” is not the subject of the sentence. The verb “to have” should agree with “showing.” Therefore, the correct form is “has.”
This is a mistake you can find in many texts on the web. You should pay close attention to it, especially if you prefer writing longer sentences.
Contractions
This is probably where the most mistakes happen – or at least it is the category most complained about. If you make a mistake here, everyone will notice
Some common mistakes here are mixing up “it’s” and “its.” “It’s” is a contraction of “it is.” “Its” is a possessive pronoun or adjective meaning “belonging to it.”
Also, keep an eye out for the distinction between “their,” “they’re,” and “there” and other contractions — especially when doing any type of PR or articles that will get mass exposure and distribution.
Punctuation
You could argue that contractions fall under punctuation. Contraction errors were so common, though, we felt they needed their own category.
Proper punctuation is essential for any blogger. Using good punctuation is pivotal if you want to create pleasing, professional texts.
You should know where to put a full stop, a comma, and a semicolon. Dashes, hyphens, proper use of quotation marks, etc. are all a part of proper punctuation.
One important sub-category here is capital letters—yes, they are a part of punctuation too. You should know the rules of capitalization through and through.
Admittedly, some capitalization rules are less important than others. Your audience might forgive you if you write “herculean” with a capital “H”. However, they won’t let it slide if you don’t capitalize the first letter of each sentence. Still, it’s good to know and periodically review all the rules.
Comma Splices
Comma splices are another common mistake. Comma splicing happens when you join independent clauses with a comma. This creates a run-on sentence which you should always avoid.
“He was thirsty, he drank a glass of water,” would then be a mistake. You can either separate the independent clauses by a full stop or include a coordinating conjunction. This is a mistake that many students face in their homework or tasks and in this regard assignment help can be a solution to this problem. The reason for this is that many school students understand the concept and reasoning behind using commas within their articles, but they still often confuse when and where they should be used for proper grammar usage.
The result would then be “He was thirsty. He drank a glass of water,” or “He was thirsty, so he drank a glass of water.”
Dangling Participles
Many people don‘t know what a dangling participle is. We’ll explain.
If a participle introduces a subordinate clause, it needs to describe an action performed by the subject of the main clause. If it doesn’t, it is a dangling participle. Dangling participles are connected to no subject in particular and make for a confusing sentence.
Take a sentence like “Traveling North, the weather got colder.” Who was traveling? “Traveling” should be connected to “weather”—the subject of the main clause. Is the weather traveling? Probably not, but we don’t know who is. It’s easy to see why dangling participles often create confusing sentences.
Split Infinitives and Prepositions at the End of the Sentence
Let’s be clear, these two are not actually grammatical mistakes. These are just rules that 17th and 18th-century grammar “experts” copied over from Latin and a few other languages.
English is obviously not Latin. In English, there is no real reason not to use these. In fact, studies show most people use them in everyday speech and that they are a standard part of the English language.
That being said, you should avoid them in your writing.
The thing is that the misconception about these two being a legitimate mistake is so widespread, some people might think you are uneducated if you use them.
In everyday conversation, you can make a case for using split infinitives. You can’t really do that on a blog unless you want to dedicate an entire post to it.
Hence our recommendation: you should know these are not mistakes, but still refrain from using them.
Conclusion
Now you know the most common mistakes to look out for when writing a blog post. Double and triple check your texts for errors. Also, try reading the text out loud – it might help you identify mistakes.
Also, you can use a tool like Grammarly to locate mistakes in your writing. Just don’t take its suggestions as the holy truth. No tool is perfect, and you should make all changes according to your best judgment. Do all of this, and you’ll end up with a professional blog that dazzles its visitors.