Angela Lansbury's 100 rules of Grammar and Spelling - the first ten

SPELLING

The first ten spelling rules

1 Your and you're.

2 Add s for plurals (sometimes es) but apostrophe then s i.e. 's  means belonging to.

3 There and their.

4 Discreet and discrete.

5 I before E except after C.

6 His hers and its are possessives. It's = it is (contracted).

7 Use a spellchecker.

8 Use a dictionary.

9 Find out your top ten errors and correct them.

10 When you copy out a word, look back at the original to check you've copied it correctly.

The first ten grammar rules.

1 If I were you. (Was is past.)

2 Many and few, or few - things or people you can count. 

I see Tesco supermarkets are changing their checkout signs. Hurray!

3 Clauses should sit next to the noun they describe. Don't put a descriptive clause about the subject of a sentence at the end of the sentence as an afterthought. You end up with nonsense and impossible events such as the team of policeman who shot a dead man firing machine guns. Clearly he wasn't. They were.

4 Start a sentence with the subject, not a pronoun such as he, her, it, they. I know that newsreaders start with pronouns nowadays. Somebody told me the programme editors are trying to compete with quiz programmes. I don't watch quiz programmes. I turn off the news if I don't hear a subject, just a guessing game.

I'll be updating this until I reach 100.

The next 10

1 Grammar

The letter a appears twice. GRAMMAR. (Not grammer!) GRAMMAR. All the letters appear twice except the initial g.  G RAM MAR. Good grammar.

PRONUNCIATION

1 CE is pronounced S

2 GE is pronounced J

3 Holy - not holly. The holy land. Oh! O as in home. (not as in hot). 

Holey - having holes.

Second ten spelling rules

1 Check surnames

Check the spelling of surnames. Keep consistent.

Einstein (No EInsteint)

Tony (Not Tonny)

Buckingham Palace

2 Check for typos and auto correct. Words which are correct may be inappropriate. 

A girl wrote to my husband> If you are interested, please message me.

Unfortunately, she changed the e to a. Her message read. If you are interested, please massage me.