Do you type “buy” when you meant to type “bye”? That’s awkward, to say the least.

It’s a shame to damage an otherwise excellent blog post with mistakes in grammar and language use. The good thing is that when you write blog posts you probably tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, so it’s easy to identify your weak spots and learn to correct mistakes before you make them.

Below are some common language use mistakes we all make. How many are you guilty of?

A or An?

It’s 1st grade stuff, really: you use “a” with words starting with a consonant and “an” with words starting with a vowel. Right? If only things were that straightforward!

“A” is also used with words starting with a consonant if, when spelled out, the first letter would begin with a vowel.

Think how “n” and “m” are pronounced, and how you would write them out. They start with a vowel: you would write [en] and [em].

This means that you say, “He is an NBA player” and not “He is a NBA player”.

Another example of this is the phrase, “There’s a U-turn coming up in 100 metres.” Here, the letter “u” is pronounced “You.” Even though the letter is a vowel, you need to use “an” because it is spelled out as if it begins with a consonant [yoo].

Homophone Wars

The carnage is dreadful. No matter how careful you are you will at some point end up confusing words like “jean” and “gene” or typing “passed” when you meant to type “past.”

Yes, the English language is full of mine fields, but familiarizing yourself with common homophone blunders you ensure you will avoid them in your writing (plus you’ll get to scold others who are still making them).

Common homophone mix-ups include these word pairs:

patience – patients

vale – veil

hear – here

your – you’re

night – knight

dear – deer

one – won

there – their – they’re

none – nun

The Fewer or Less predicament

This is not really a predicament if you know a simple rule. “Fewer” is used with countable nouns, as in “fewer lessons” and “fewer flowers.” For uncountable nouns use “less” – say “less money” or “less time.”

Note however that you will use “less” and not “fewer” when reporting on a measurement, as the Oxford Dictionary says. Example: “They got divorced in less than 3 years after getting married.”

Dangling modifiers

Think of a dangling modifier as a word without a root. It’s a word, phrase, or clause in a sentence, where it is not clear which other phrase or word in a sentence it is connected to. The noun can either be very far from the modifier or not present in the sentence at all. Consider the following sentence:

“Reading your complaint letter, my dog will not go outdoors unattended again.”

This sentence omits  the noun altogether. For clarity, it should read:

“Reading your complain letter, I will not let my dog outdoors unattended again.”

This restores peace in your neighborhood and reassures your neighbor your dog doesn’t have a reading superpower. But if you learn to avoid these common mistakes, you’ll definitely be a super writer!

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Do you know someone with great vocabulary? Have you wondered about how they managed to learn and remember such beautiful, impressive words?

Some people are voracious readers. They enrich their vocabulary with new words and concepts as a natural byproduct of constant reading. Other people have an inborn knack for languages; for them, vocabulary acquisition and expansion comes naturally. The rest of us rely on vocabulary building programs to improve our vocabulary.

Ultimate Vocabulary™ is one such program. It helps people enrich and expand their lexicon through activities and games that have been designed by experts. Ultimate Vocabulary™ is developed by eReflect, an industry leader in self-learning software that champions independent, life-long learning.

Independent reviews of Ultimate Vocabulary™ will quickly reassure you that this is an investment-worthy program that will boost your vocabulary and make you an adept user of the English language. But don’t take my word for it.

Top Ten Reviews has announced that Ultimate Vocabulary™ is their pick for the best vocabulary building program for 2014, awarding the software two of its most esteemed awards, the 2014 Gold and Excellence awards.

Word-Buff also assessed Ultimate Vocabulary™ and has found it to be above par, stating, “… compared to other programs Ultimate Vocabulary is by far the most sophisticated vocabulary builder I’ve used to date, and, as I mentioned earlier, it has become my default program for building my own vocabulary (and with a site dedicated to words, I do get to try quite a few).”

But what is it about Ultimate Vocabulary™ that puts it head and shoulders above all its rivals?

According to the Top Ten Reviews editors, one of the reasons for its superiority is that Ultimate Vocabulary™ lets the user learn at their own pace with a multitude of activities, lessons, and games. The sheer number of activities and resources available ensure people of all ages and learning competencies can benefit from practicing with the program.

What is more, its numerous learning methods suggest that people of different learning styles (acoustic, visual, kinetic) will all find exercises that help them to boost their vocabulary in the way that benefits them the most. Top Ten Reviews has given the program a 9.9 rating, essentially declaring Ultimate Vocabulary™ their top pick in the vocabulary building category.

The reviewer at Word-Buff, Derek McKenzie, has offered his own evaluation of Ultimate Vocabulary™’s capacities and limitations. The verdict was that Ultimate Vocabulary™ has no true rival, compared to other vocabulary builders. It offers the most comprehensive learning experience of the products the reviewer has seen, since it integrates a multitude of learning methods, resources, and activities to practice with.

With Ultimate Vocabulary™, the learner gets access to plenty of resources, all designed to help them quickly and effectively improve their verbal skills.

McKenzie notes that by combining online resources with offline practice material, Ultimate Vocabulary is the perfect software for enhancing knowledge of new words and learning how to use them effectively. The reviewer it particularly useful and convenient that each word presented comes with an audio pronunciation so that the user learns the correct pronunciation and not just the word’s meaning.

In an interview with English-Test co-founder Torsten Daerr, Marc Slater, director of eReflect, talked about vocabulary building as a lifelong process, and a self-investment people can make that will add value to everything they do. Slater remarked that the need for a top-quality all-in-one vocabulary improvement program is what prompted the company to develop Ultimate Vocabulary™ in the first place. The result is a program that offers guided, personalized, and top quality activities.

These varied insights and opinions on Ultimate Vocabulary™ show that the program is justifiably number one in reviews, as no other vocabulary builder is so diligently dedicated to offering word mastery at such an in-depth level and with so many practice resources to choose from.

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