There’s no doubt about it, some mistakes are more common than others.

And some mistakes are more common for speakers of a particular language.

In my ten years in Spain, I must have corrected the mistake ‘people is’ at least three and a half thousand times. That’s a conservative estimate of at least once a day for ten years.

Do you make this mistake?

The worst thing is that everybody who makes this mistake knows they are making a mistake.

This is what a typical ‘people is’ correction looks like if you were ever wondering:

“I think Spanish people is very family oriented”

“People are, not people is”

“Yes, I know”

And naturally, when they reply with “yes, I know”, I ask, “then why did you make the mistake?”

“Well, it comes out without me thinking”

And there is the key to the mistake: without me thinking.

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A simple exercise to remove this mistake is to make a hundred, no, two hundred (just to be sure) sentences that begin with adjective + people are.

For example, English people are… Rude people are… Spanish people are… , and one hundred and ninety-seven more.

Then you’ll be cured.

Now, I’m a huge proponent of making mistakes. Some of the best and most important things you will learn in life and in English will come from mistakes. I would much prefer you to experiment and make mistakes in order to learn than not say anything at all.

But of course, make mistakes with the idea of learning from them.

And that’s the most important thing, you must learn from every mistake you make.

If you make a mistake and don’t learn from it (i.e. you repeat the mistake frequently), then you’re just like a hamster running on a wheel.

Here’s a great practice exercise that you can do to identify and get rid of persistent mistakes. You should absolutely put an emphasis on error correction if you want to improve, as getting rid of mistakes is the easiest way to improve.

And not finding and getting rid of them is the easiest to stay stuck at the level you’re at.

1 – The apostrophe

Assuming you´re using the apostrophe correctly, the most important thing when writing in English is to make sure you actually use the apostrophe key on a keyboard.

Sounds obvious, right?

But unfortunately, 90% of English learners don`t use this button, and instead they´ll use one of the two accent keys to make “something that kind of looks a bit like an apostrophe”, but isn`t.

This is a pet hate of mine.

The accent key doesn´t produce an apostrophe.

And it looks damn ugly too.

Look at all the “apostrophes” in this part of the post, and you´ll see that I´ve written all of them with one of the two accent keys.

Now compare them to all the other apostrophes from the rest of the post and you can see the clear difference between them.

It looks shocking to an English eye because that punctuation mark does not exist in English, so it jumps out.

It is a much more diagonal mark, whereas the true apostrophe is almost vertical. Also, the accent wants to be above a letter, not between letters, so there is a big, unnatural gap between the two letters it separates.

The bottom line: do not use the accent keys to make an apostrophe.

It looks horrible.

Use the apostrophe key. It’s the same key as the question mark.

2 – Please followed by a comma

Another classic mistake that Spanish speakers often make.

Don’t write “please, …”.

It sounds weird.

It’s perfectly fine to write it that way in Spanish, but most of the time in English, it will sound very strange.

We only write “please,” when we want to express one of two things: you’re annoyed, or you’re begging.

Normally, you do not want to express one of these two things.

Most of the time, it just sounds as if you’re annoyed. Really, when you write please followed by a comma, you’re not really saying please.

Imagine you write, “Please, send me the document as soon as you can”, well, it just sounds pretty rude.

You could write that in the following situation: you send a polite email requesting a document at the person’s convenience. They don’t reply. You send another email asking for it again. They don’t reply. You become annoyed with the person for not responding and you want to express that, so you write the above sentence to communicate your frustration.

In this situation, you’re not really saying please, you’re showing that you’re annoyed.

So, if you shouldn’t write please followed by a comma in a sentence, how should you use it?

Easy. In one of three ways.

1. At the end of a simple, polite request, AFTER a comma.

“Can I have a coffee, please?” or, “I’d like a coffee, please”.

2. Before the main verb in a request to be extra polite.

“Could you please send me the document at your earliest convenience?”

3. Before an imperative.

Generally, we don’t like to use imperatives in English as it can sound a bit direct and rude (we don’t like to sound direct or rude…), but sometimes you can’t avoid it. That’s fine. You can use an imperative in written English without sounding rude, as long as you write please directly before the imperative.

BUT. Without a comma.

“Please send me the document at your earliest convenience”

If you put a comma after the please, it completely changes the sentence.

The bottom line: don’t write a comma after please, because if you do, you can appear rude.

3 – Word order

This is a simple but frequent mistake in written English.

People may write things like, “Are coming my friends this evening to my house”.

I’ve obviously chosen a huge mistake to demonstrate my point, but even so, you’d be surprised how often these kinds of mistakes are made, even by C1 students.

The basic golden rule in English is subject + verb + object.

If you follow that, then you can’t go wrong.

“My friends are coming to my house this evening”.

You may need to add other words to the sentence, as in the above sentence. They too follow a rule.

You can look at the rules if you want to and do a few practice exercises, it’ll do no harm, but I find the best way to really make it become ingrained in your head is by reading fiction.

In fiction, you have thousands upon thousands of sentences where you can actually see them written, and look at the word order.

Take a sentence in a book, any sentence that has a couple of objects, an adverb, maybe a time expression too.

Then take a good look at it and observe the order.

Read it aloud.

Then make a little modification to the sentence, changing the subject and the verb and reading it aloud again.

Then make a change to the time expression or adverb and read it aloud again.

Make as many changes as you can in five minutes. With each modification, the structure and word order of the sentence will become ever more ingrained in your head and will help you when you need to write or say a sentence of your own in the future.

The bottom line: observe and practise correct order to avoid sounding like Yoda from Star Wars.

If you can avoid these three silly mistakes, then you’ll be well on your way to producing good written English.

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