Beyond your they’re, their, theres, and proper punctuation and sentence structure, some of grammar’s finer details can trip people up.
Personally, I’m in favour of overlooking outdated rules, such as not ending sentences with prepositions, or not starting sentences with conjunctions. What I’m focusing on here are those rules that are very much still in practice, just less well-known, even amongst copywriters and other marketers.
Capitalisation after a colon
I find that the vast majority of people automatically capitalise the first letter after a colon, but it’s actually an Americanism (one of many!) that’s crept into our language. In British English, we don’t capitalise the first word after a colon unless it’s a proper noun or an acronym. For example, ‘Colons: when to capitalise’ would be correct, but so would ‘Colon capitalisation: English grammar rules to follow’ as well.
The only exception to this would be within a title, and that’s only if you’re using title case rather than sentence case (but we could have a whole other blog post on this).
Verb vs noun spellings
Just in case English wasn’t complicated enough, sometimes words can change spelling or format depending on whether we’re using them as a noun or a verb. Often when this occurs, the noun uses a C, and the verb, an S. For example, practice and practise, or licence and license. Again, some of this confusion comes from the fact that in American English (rolls eyes), both are spelt with a C.
Similarly, the use of nouns or verbs can also affect the format. For example, we’d say ‘setup’ when used as a noun and ‘set up’ when used as a verb.
Spelling out numbers after a full stop
Another little-known grammar rule is spelling out numbers that immediately follow a full stop, rather than using digits. This includes percentages, e.g. ‘Forty-nine percent of participants’, rather than ‘49% of participants.’ Where this can feel inconsistent, and sometimes uncomfortable, is if you have an article which includes lots of statistics, all written as digits, before suddenly switching to the full words due to their placement. You may wish to get around this by rewording your sentence so it’s not at the start, e.g. ‘almost half of participants (49%).’
Using ‘a’ or ‘an’ depends on sound not spelling
I’d personally consider this to be a fairly obvious one, but I often see the two mixed up, especially within more high-brow publications which always surprises me.
It is correct to write ‘an SOS’ rather than ‘a SOS’ because while S is a consonant, the sound (‘ess’) begins with a vowel. Similarly, you’d write ‘an hour’ rather than ‘a hour’ (I hope).
Don’t even get me started on ‘an hotel’….
Order of adjectives
If this alarms you, don’t panic – while there is a generally agreed upon order to use adjectives, it’s also likely that you instinctively follow this sequence without even realising.
When listing multiple adjectives, they should follow this order: opinion, size, age, shape, origin, colour and purpose. While a bit wordy, the sentence “a beautiful little antique Tuscan oak table” sounds a lot less clunky than “a Tuscan beautiful antique little oak table”.
Of course there are plenty more obscure grammar rules that I haven’t mentioned, but these ones tickled my fancy because they’re so often overlooked (and because I’m a grammar nerd).
With Google paying more attention to correct use of spelling and grammar within its algorithms, it’s worth the extra effort to give your copy the edge.