Hi: Credibility is one of the hardest things to come by online. (Did you know that?) It amazes me to see how many people flush theirs down the proverbial loo by mixing up the following words. If you struggle with them, here's help... YOUR vs YOU'RE Your shows ownership Example: it’s your choice, it’s your money You’re is a contraction of “you” and “are” Example: You're on the right track THEIR, THEY'RE & THERE Their refers to when "they" own something. Example: It's their house. Their website is nice. They're is a contraction for 'they are' Example: They're giving away $500 There means "at/in that place," "at that point" or "in that way" Examples: Sit over there... stop right there... I can't agree with you there. LOOSE vs LOSE Loose means not fastened, uncontainted, not bundled or not tightly fitting. Examples: A pile of loose papers. My shoes are too loose. Lose means to fail to keep, to fail to maintain, or to fail to win. Example: You can lose money, you can lose your keys and you can lose a game. What on earth does grammar have to do with a profit forum? Easy. If you tell people they can loose weight with your program - you'll probably lose the sale, lose the profit and lose credibility, too. Same thing if you tell them "there" welcome to join your group. Know what I find mildly amusing? The number of people online that claim to have a Master's Degree or a Doctorate, but still mix those words up. I know a lot of people struggle with grammar, but are colleges that bad? Bad enough that a person can hold a degree and not know the difference between 'they're' and 'there'? Or do you think there are a lot of people with bogus doctorates and degrees? Maybe an interesting conversation? : ) Linda P.S. Know any others that get skewed often or that drive you up the wall?

how about the missing comma? As in a sentence that goes on with no pause so that you forget that you can take a breath or change a thought and move on to different line of thinking in a single sentence or the missing period so that you end up with a sentence that is a pargraph that should be a collection of sentences that make up a paragraph but they don't they just go on and on and on and seem to never end and when you get to the end you have to go back to the start to figure out what is was you just read and then half way thorugh you realize that that was about 15 minutes of you're life that you will never be able to get back and what you are reading really doesn't amount to much but it contained a heck of a lot of words that really didn't tell you anything or say much and you start to wonder why you are even reading what you reading and what are you supposed to be getting out of it and what else you could be doing with your time that be of more useful like stabbing a pen in your eye or something of that nature and the sentence isn't teaching you anything so you wonder if the person that wrote it would do the same if they were talking to a group and, oh look I just did it.

Linda, My son is my grammar policeman. I know the correct grammar for all the samples you gave here but sometimes I'm stuck on punctuation. He actually learned his grammar in grade school and never forgot. He went to a private school in those years and they really honed it into them. Teachers at the public high schools always comment on how well the students from that school are taught grammar. He always gets good grades on his papers at college. I think they should know grammar before they ever get to college. I think sometimes people are lazy and don't check spelling typos and grammar even if they know better. Martha

Hey Peter, THAT was really amusing. I have a young fellow who emails me from time to time and he does exactly that. When you open his email you just let out a great big sigh then start reading trying to figure out what that great mass of words is supposed to mean. Linda, I agree with your comments. Every time I see those sorts of mistakes made by a person claiming PhD or whatever I wonder why their degree did not include some units of basic English. LOL! It certainly damages website credibility. I figure that if the person is either ignorant or careless with a website (their storefront) then how good will their goods or services be? Hmm. Gary Simpson

And don't forget the ones that make three completely different statments of fact in that same periodless sentence!