Its "definately" time for grammer fun lesson’s with you're freind Erin

Bad grammar makes the baby Jesus cry
Originally uploaded by justjk.

Oh, it hurt just to type that. It really did.

I’m the kind of person who considers carrying a black marker wherever she goes, should the need arise to cross out haphazard punctuation or glaring grammatical errors in publicly posted signs.

I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve wanted to get out a pen and deface someone else’s property (restaurant menus, storefront signs, etc.) because of unnecessary apostrophes or other grammatical atrocities. I should note here that I’m referring only to mistakes made in the U.S. or other English-speaking countries—mistakes in signs here, while sometimes unintentionally rather amusing, are forgiven as English is not the native language. Besides, if I tried to make a sign in Indonesian, it would undoubtedly make little or no sense.

At home in my native country, though, poorly worded storefront signs have actually stopped me from going inside and browsing.

One summer during college I worked at a gift store whose window boasted this grammatical train wreck of a sign:

{{PLEASE}}
No “Shopping Carts”
No “Drinks”
No “Food”
ALLOWED “in” the store.
[“THANK YOU”!!]

OK, so no hypothetical or ironic shopping carts, drinks or food were allowed in the hypothetical or ironic store. I didn’t even know what to make of the brackets. This sign irritated the “hell” out of me so much that I tore it down and made a replacement as soon as I possibly could.

I am equally disturbed by unnecessary apostrophes.

All Shoe’s On Sale!

All of Shoe’s what are on sale!?

It isn't rocket science:

It's=it is
Its=possessive

Your=possessive
You're=you are

Your so awesome.

I know. The so awesome, it belongs to me.

Definitely, misspelled "definately," definitely gives me a headache.

Look, no one’s perfect. I overuse ellipses and parentheses and I have to think twice about how to spell separately. I was often so comma-happy when writing articles at the SCI that I thought my beloved editor was going to staple me to the wall sometimes. Still, that’s why she was there—to edit, to proofread.

There are worse things in life than being grammatically disinclined. If you are, it doesn’t make you a bad person. Just please, please do me this one favor:

If your writing something for the public too read, its a good “idea” to have one of you’re friend’s or coworker’s read it first. “Thank’s!”