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If you use incorrect grammar in your articles, you might lose credibility; therefore, it is important that you make yourself familiar with some of the most common grammar mistakes that people tend to make. Today, I would like to write a few words about three common mistakes: unnecessary capitalization, mistaken apostrophes, and the use of double negatives.

Some writers and publishers tend to start words with a capital letter when there is no reason to do so. Capital letters should be used in a few cases: when writing a person’s name, trademark, acronyms, and titles. One of the most common mistakes is to use a capital letter for describing common words that can be found in dictionaries. Sentence such as “Welcome to our Criminal Defense office” is incorrect, because there is no need to capitalize ‘criminal’ or ‘defense’ as they are common words. Titles fall under different rules than regular sentences. While writing a title, you can capitalize every word. You may choose not to capitalize words such as ‘the’, ‘of’, ‘in’, or ‘a’. Just remember that every other word should be capitalized.

People also tend to make many mistakes while using apostrophes. The rule is that you should use the apostrophe and ‘s’ to describe that somebody owns something, like “Donald’s house is new.” If you have to use the apostrophe to describe plural possessives, place the apostrophe after the letter ‘s’, such as the students’ book.

The English language is one of those languages that does not allow for double negatives. You can say, “He knows nothing” or “He does not know anything,” but you should never say “He doesn’t know nothing”.