This Post (It) Should Be Read, And Other Grammatical Musings

From time to time, I will comment on grammatical errors that bug me. This post is about a couple of errors that have become so common that I find myself making at least one of them.

One problem is that almost everyone nowadays uses both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same function in a sentence, namely that of the subject, for example, saying "My sister she called me today" instead of the more correct, "My sister called me today." I hear this every day by people who should know better, such as news anchors (okay, so maybe they really don't know better), and actors in movies and on television who are reading scripts written by educated writers (okay, so maybe they aren't that educated).

The rule, which can be found as 30c n the book Rules for Writers (6th ed.) by Diana Hacker, Nancy Sommers, Tom Jehn, Jane Rosenzweig, Marcy Carbajal Van Horn, is "Do not use both a noun and a pronoun to perform the same grammatical function in a sentence" (p. 255).

Now that you're aware of it, try to listen for this mistake.

Another grammatical error that I notice is when people (again, news anchors are common grammatical criminals) screw up the subject verb agreement with singular and plural, for example, saying "There's a lot of cars" instead of "There are a lot of cars." Maybe people wouldn't make this mistake as much if they didn't make a contraction of "there" and "is," but then again, maybe they would. Or, maybe it's just easier to say "There's" than to say "There are."

Either way, we are slowly becoming a country of illiterates.