The mistake I see more often than any other online is confusion between “your” & “you’re”. How many times have you seen an e-mail appear in your inbox which begins: “If your serious about your online opportunity…”? Don’t know about you, but that makes me hit the delete button at once.

It’s all to do with whether to put in that apostrophe or not – and it’s easy to work it out if you understand what the apostrophe is for.

An apostrophe is used for two main reasons:

1)To denote that something belongs to someone – i.e. Jane’s book, the dog’s dinner; or

2) to indicate that a letter has been missed out.

It’s reason no. 2 that’s operating with “you’re” where the apostrophe stands for the missing ‘a’ – because “you’re” is just the short way of saying “you are”.

“Your”, on the other hand – no apostrophe – means ‘belonging to you’. (That’s partly why it gets confusing, because apostrophes are used with nouns to indicate “belonging” – as in reason no.1 above – but not with pronouns or possessive adjectives like your, my, his etc.)

So what the unfortunate e-mail writer should have written, of course, was: “If you’re serious about your online opportunity…” And having seen this particular mistake so often (it obviously comes from some pre-written e-mail designed to sell an affiliate program), I’m so pleased when I find someone who’s actually corrected it, that I will stop & read their e-mail.

Virginia Rounding is a published writer whose website of
Internet Resources for Writers looks at additional ways for
writers to earn money, in the hope of making it possible
for them to keep writing without having to resort either to
full-time employment or to destitution. For a selection of
free resources or to subscribe to her new ezine Poetry
Competition Updates, go to
http://www.virginiarounding.com/links.html