» English is a Terrible Language

English is a terrible language. With more exceptions than rules, it's right up there as one of the most complicated languages to get perfectly correct (I understand number one is Icelandic). The point is, there are millions of mistakes waiting to be made, and many of them are so obscure they pass without comment. With that, we come to the crux of this article: if most people don't know it's wrong, why bother to learn what's right?

Luckily for all involved, that's not a rhetorical question. You should learn what's right because it's right. If that's not enough for you, you should learn what's right so you can feel superior to the people who don't. Lets face it, we all want to be better than the next man or woman or hermaphrodite, and knowing proper English is one way you can best them. Conversely, you don't want the smarmy superior people to correct you to your face and make you feel small, so coming up are some common mistakes you don't want to make.

Always remember that comics are in most cases a language based medium. Some contain no words at all, and more power to them, but if you have any words in your comic at all, you should really be lumping it into the same category as literature rather than thinking of it only as a visual art. If you were to write a book, you wouldn't submit it to a publisher with spelling errors, so why allow errors when submitting your comic to the internet, and thus, the whole world?

#1: When to apostrophize
According to my spellchecker, yes, apostrophize is a word, meaning "To use an apostrophe." This might be a good time to mention that you cannot always trust a spell checker, and there really is no substitute for a human editor or proof-reader. If you can get one for your comic, you should. It's very easy to read something you've written yourself five times over and still not notice anything wrong, while a fresh perspective will notice errors right away. Anyway, apostrophes generally mean one of two things: they can represent ownership, or they can represent letters that have been removed.

With ownership, it's generally very simple. For example, "The bike belongs to Joe. It is Joe's bike." Apostrophe, then S, and we have ownership. The confusion comes when there is more than one owner, or if the word ends with an S already. For example, say the bike belonged to all the SmackTalk writers, you might be tempted to write "The writers's bike." Or if it belonged to Jesus, "Jesus's bike." Looks awkward, doesn't it? That's because it's wrong. The rule is, when displaying ownership on a word ending with S, you add the apostrophe but NOT another S. So we have "The writers' bike" or "Jesus' bike." You also might have thought "Jesuses bike" looks better, and it does, but it's still wrong. ES added to a word ending in S makes it a plural rather than expressing ownership, so by writing "Jesuses" you implied there's more than one son of God. Lucky you read this, or you might have been burned as a heretic (or you could have just been talking about Mexicans. Whatever.)

The other use for apostrophes, as mentioned before, is to replace letters that have been removed for an abbreviation. Think of "Can't." It's derived from "Can not" but is missing an N and an O. The word "Cannot" has no apostrophe, because no letters are removed, only a space. Also think of "You're" which is taken from "You are" (as opposed to "your" meaning "owned by you"). If you struggle, always try saying the sentence without any contractions, and you'll notice which "your" should be yours. Remember this paragraph when we tackle the next section...

#2: They're doing their thing over there.
"There" is an example of a homophone: more than one word with the same sound, but spelt differently and with different meanings. The three "Theres" make up the mistakes I see most often in webcomics. However, there are tricks to remember which one to use.

If you remember from the last section, an apostrophe represents missing letters (sometimes). "They're" has an apostrophe, because that's the one which means "They are." If you could reword your sentence to say "They are" then that's the one you should use.

The one spelt T-H-E-R-E is only one letter away from "Here" and it's not just a coincidence. They both express location. A little word association, and BAM, you know which one to use.

The last one, "Their," means "Belonging to them." I'm afraid I don't have a very clever trick to remember that one, but one that works is "If it's not the other two, it's this one." Process of elimination should be everyone's best friend.

No word in the English language is spelt "Ther." Never use it. It might be excusable in an instant message conversation where you want to cut out every possible nanosecond of unproductive time, but a comic should be a labor of love, and you should be spending more than just a few seconds on getting your text right. Unless you LIKE looking like a Silly Billy, of course.

#3: It's a matter of its usage.
Perhaps the second most common misuse of the English language is the misspelling of the terms "it's" and "its" - knowing the proper usage of these words is really what separates the men from the boys in proper grammar usage. It's really quite simple to keep them straight:

"It's" has an apostrophe, and therefore stands for two words - "it is." If your sentence can read "It is" then use the apostrophe.

"Its" stands for the possessive. This is one of the many exceptions in the English language, where an apostrophe is not needed to indicate possession. If you have a book with a torn cover, you would say "The book's cover is torn." In this case, you could also say "That book, its cover is torn."

This is just a start, but remember there is always help available if you're unsure about any language-based problems. Advertise in the Artist Collaboration section of the forum for an editor, you might just get lucky. Also, please please please remember this little tip: whenever you doubt the spelling of a word, look it up! Use a dictionary or thesaurus. Use Google and type "define:[your word here]" to get a definition of a word you don't know. If what you typed isn't actually a word, Google will suggest similar ones, often giving you the correct spelling. It can be a real help. There are also thousands of websites around giving grammatical rules if you're inspired enough to do some homework. Remember, if you can't spot the poor speller on the forum, it's you...

Online resources:
Grammar rules: The Blue Book
Spell Checking: Online Spell Checker
Dictionary / Thesaurus / Encyclopedia: Dictionary.com

- Charlie