I received a link to this fun little page a week ago, but only just got around to reading it now.  It’s awesome.  Thank you, Janet.

I’ve referred to myself, in jest, as a bit of a grammar snob.  Usually when people read my writing for the first time, one of the things that I commonly hear is that it’s nice to read something that (generally) uses complete sentences.  That’s not to say that I’m fanatical about it.  I definitely take some liberties with my writing, especially when it comes to the blog.  I don’t believe that there is a style guide out there anywhere that advocates ending sentences with three periods.  Yet it’s not uncommon to see me end mine like this…  Followed by some sentence fragment…

But, despite a few questionable stylistic oddities, I generally try to follow the rules of proper grammar.  Spelling, on the other hand… well… If I don’t run a post through the spell-checker prior to sending it out, chances are that something will be wrong.

So here is list of 10 commonly misspelled words, and some fun and easy ways to remember how to properly spell them.  It didn’t take me long to find my own pet peeve, “then” vs “than”.  For me, that’s a deal-breaker.  When I read something that uses the word “then” when it should be “than” my skin crawls.  I know some very intelligent people who continue to use the wrong word, and I don’t know if they will ever change.

To that point, I’m far from perfect.  I only very recently stopped writing her’s and your’s.  For some reason, I had convinced myself that was the possessive case for her and your.  I still find myself typing those, but usually catch them on my own as I am typing them.  Hers.  Yours.  Hers.  Yours.

One of the other mistakes that I make constantly is the word alot… except that it’s not a word.  I misspell this nearly every time I write it.  Frankly, I think that it should be a word, but who am I to argue with the grammar gods?  Sometimes I go back and fix it, a lot of the time I don’t bother.  Just depends on my mood.

Surprisingly, ofcourse didn’t make the list.  I spell this incorrectly just as often as I spell alot.  Of course.  Of course.  Of course.  No matter how many times I type that, it still doesn’t look as natural to me as ofcourse.

As for the others on the list, most of them are things that I don’t have a problem with.  Except the word definitely.  It’s pretty much a 50-50 toss up whether I spell that definately.  I figured that I was the only one, but apparently it must be more common than I had originally thought.  Definitely.  Definitely.  Definitely.

I’ve never heard of the website, The Oatmeal, but this page that they put up is certainly worth a read.  You might even learn something…

(Ironically, when I ran the post through the spell-checker, I misspelled the word misspell each time!  Ha.)

I wrote about this in Chap 1 of the blog, but I thought that it was time to remind people (and inform new readers) of this wonderful little toolbar from Airmiles.

Airmiles teamed up with Yahoo to create a toolbar that works with Internet Explorer and Firefox.  I’m not sure about Chrome, Opera, or Safari since I don’t use any of those. You need to enter your Airmiles card number when you attemt to download the software.  After that, it installs with your information already loaded. 

The main advantage of this toolbar is that, for every 50 searches you do through Yahoo’s search engine, you will be awarded 5 airmiles, to a maximum of 40 per month.  It’s incredibly easy to accumulate airmiles, even if you’re not sitting there trying to artificially create searches.  Rather than type cnn.com into my address bar, now I type cnn into the Yahoo search box first, then click on cnn.com which will come up as the first choice.  It’s an extra step, but it’s not hard.  Sure, many people are so used to using Google, that the thought of another search engine is foreign to them.  But some of us remember a time before Google was a verb, and Yahoo is still a very competent search engine.  And it’s not like you can’t go to Google.com if you can’t find what you’re looking for.  Pretty unlikely. 

I’ve been using the toolbar faithfully for a few months, and I have yet to max out to 40 airmiles.  I think that the most that I’ve gotten to is 30, and I did a little creative searching on the last day of the month to get me to the next 50 search cutoff.  And hey, I figure that 30 airmiles from something as simple as using a search engine… well, that’s more than I get from shopping at Sobeys and buying my gas from Shell. 

Combined!