New Bloggers: Brush Up on Your Sixth-Grade Grammar

Read more advice for new blog writers at New Bloggers: Think Like a Publishing Professional.

I’ve been a grammar geek since high school, and that interest has served me well. At different points in my publishing career, I’ve been a writer, an editor, or a proofreader. Here are the grammatical errors I most commonly see on quilting blogs.

This picture serves no purpose other than to show you
that when I’m not quilting, I’m sewing bags!

Contractions

It’s means “it is.” Its is a possessive pronoun. (Instagram users, take note. Auto-correct can lead you astray on this grammatical point, and you are smarter than auto-correct!)

• Correct: It’s great that she paid a bajillion dollars for my quilt!

• Correct: I’d like to give that quilt its due and cut it into a bajillion pieces! Mwahahahaha!

Pronouns

Using I or myself instead of me doesn’t make you sound smarter. Often, it’s just plain wrong.

Me: This is an objective case pronoun. Something is happening to it. Use me in prepositional phrases.

• Correct: Please send your comments about our amazing quilt to So-and-So or me. 

I: This is a nominative case pronoun. It’s the subject of the sentence, the one doing the action.

• Correct: So-and-So and I are hosting a blog hop.

• Incorrect: Join So-and-So and I in our blog hop. (A quick way to test your pronouns here is to simplify things. “Join I ...” sounds weird, right? “Join me ...” works, though. When you add your dear friend So-and-So to the mix, you know it should be “Join So-and-So and me.”)

• Incorrect: The bloggers in this hop include So-and-So, So-and-So’s best friend, and I. (You can use the same test here. “The bloggers ... include I” sounds odd, but “The bloggers ... include me” works. The sentence should be written: The bloggers in this hop include So-and-So, So-and-So’s best friend, and me.)

Myself: This is a reflexive pronoun. A reflexive pronouns calls attention to itself and ends in self or selves.

• Correct: I hurt myself with my sewing shears while cutting that quilt into a bajillion pieces.

• Correct: I thought to myself, That quilt will be mine!

• Incorrect: Please send your comments about our amazing quilt to So-and-So or myself. (This sentence should read “So-and-So or me.”)

Run-on sentences

Periods and conjunctions are your friends! If you have two independent clauses—that is, two chunks of words that can stand alone as complete sentences—they need more than a comma joining them.

• Incorrect: She gave me fat quarters of Amy Butler’s new line, they’re beautiful! (“She gave me fat quarters of Amy Butler’s new line” is a complete sentence that could stand on its own. “They’re beautiful” is also a complete sentence.)

• Correct: She gave me fat quarters of Amy Butler’s new line! They’re beautiful! (You can fix the problem in the incorrect sentence above—called a “comma splice”—by breaking the sentence into two.)

• Correct: She gave me fat quarters of Amy Butler’s new line, and they’re beautiful! (You can also fix the situation by adding and or another coordinating conjunction [or, but] after the comma.)

• Correct: She gave me fat quarters of Amy Butler’s new line; they’re beautiful! (If the relationship between the two sentences is especially close, you could also replace the comma with a semicolon.)