Grammar Punk Blog

I know I’ve probably done this pair before but in the past week I’ve run into these commonly confused words used incorrectly—in a novel! Which just kills me. And sets me off on another tangent. I am a writer, a published writer, which means I’ve edited my fair share of manuscripts and caught my own ‘I can’t believe I made that mistake’ mistakes as I’m editing and re-editing so I am in no way disparaging the hard-working editors tasked with the truly mind-numbing job of editing other people’s words. That being said, I’m still pretty much astonished when I run into silly little errors like commonly confused words in the middle of books that I know for a fact have gone through an even dozen rounds of editing. And yet, there they are, leaping out at you like an unwelcome story element in the middle of the otherwise neatly printed book.

Or yet again, that could just be me.

Anyway, I’m revisiting here and hear because there they were, wrong as could be in the middle of this otherwise delightful novel, which mean someone somewhere in that editing process messed up and wrote it wrong in the first place and then made the deadly error of allowing the spell-checker to do their job for them. Proofread, people. Then when you’re finished, do it again.  

Here: in, at, or to the place where you are, or at a place near you

Hear: to perceive or be able to perceive sound

Not to be confused with one another because of course they mean entirely different things!

Grammar Punk Sentence: H E 3 Here and Hear

For once and for all, the forest told the trees, there is no sound here to hear.  

Give it a try. Write a sentence or two using these particular commonly confused