[The Oatmeal] Ten Words You Need to Stop Misspelling

Yeah, google sucks!

 

Now that you know it's incorrect, will you continue to do it? I hope not, sir.

Don't you just hate it when people don't end sentences properly? I do.

 

I woulda stopped but I don't want to Swoly!

 

^ That's what SHE said. Come on, now... sliders, sinkers, I'll bat all of them out the park... :grin:

 

Yeah, people who don't end sentences with proper punctuation are annoying.

 

^ Incorrect. "I wonder" is a full sentence of the declarative statement type, so it requires a period. It is not a question (requiring a question mark).

You would have been right, had I written "Do I wonder what book you have?," sir.

 

Epic fail. The whole sentence assumes that, by "book," I am referring to a physically-bound book, i.e. "purchase," when I am clearly using book in the more figurative meaning, as idiom.

 

I think alot is accepted now.

 

Not to sound too arrogant, but as a non-native speaker, I actually find it funny that all the examples given in the original post (which happen a lot here every day) even have to be explained to native speakers. Shouldn't everyone who spent at least 6 years in a U.S school of any kind know this?

 

The public school system in the US doesn't place much emphasis on learning the English language.

As you are probably aware, I'm a poor speller and my grammar is very poor, but it was unbelievably bad until 9th grade, I wasted years in English class with teachers trying to teach kids how to form coherent thoughts and read.

And it's not like my school is terrible, we're pretty highly regarded in the state (the state that's #1 in education) and in the top 300 for the country.

 

Actually esl students usually do much better with grammar "rules" than natives, because they are generally more rigid in the application. Natives aren't nearly as worried about being understood as non-natives are, I suspect is the reason.

 

It works the same way with Spanish, if you study Spanish as a 2nd language (like I do) you know about the preterit and the imperfect and the future progressive.

A native speaker probably doesn't know the technical terms and most likely speaks differently than the formal spanish taught in schools.

 

Whomever miss-spelled them word is kewl

 

The fact that the top ten misspelled/misused words never change tells me we never learn.

 

Fail.
Question marks go behind direct questions and questions imbedded within statements. They do not go behind indirect questions.
Yours was a question imbedded within a statement.
Your question was: "I wonder, what book you have?"

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/marks/question.htm