December, 2006, The Daily Telegraph

Mind Your Language

"Everybody will make mistakes and you can't punish them severely for that," commented best selling author Bill Bryson, when judging the science writing competition in 2006. However, he was passionate that accurate spelling, punctuation and grammar are crucial because they "indicate a certain discipline of mind."

Check your entry for the following common howlers:

1. Noun-verb mismatch, for example "A herd of horses are better than a flock of sheep" when "herd" is singular. "A team of scientists report a breakthrough today". A team is singular, so it should be "reports."

2. Ending a sentence with a preposition, for example "This is something we need to work on".

3. Inconsistent Verb Tenses. "Government officials said that they are correcting the problem." The sentence shifts from past to present and should read "Government officials said that they were correcting/had corrected the problem."

4. Apostrophe abuse. These little marks have three basic uses: To show possession (Einstein's idea, the Jones' dog); to mark the omissions in contractions (can't, instead of can not, or who'll instead of who will ); or to form plurals.

Bill Bryson bemoaned how entrants were obviously bright and "yet they don't know that the 'world's finest' has an apostrophe.''

5. More apostrophe abuse. Other common errors include writing 1990's when it should be 1990s and mixing up It's and Its: "It's" is short for "it is" or "it has" ("it's raining"), whereas "its" is a possessive pronoun, as in "its coat."