Grammar Resolutions

I attended a holiday party this year where each person was asked to provide a bottle of wine to swap and a creative New Year’s resolution. My resolution was this: I will never say “your” when what I mean is “you’re.” It was a very sincere resolution that I wanted to share with the world. But that is not the only grammar resolution that I would like to make. Here are my top resolutions:


1. I will never say “went” when I mean “gone.” It is always, “We would have gone,” never, “We would have went.”

2. I will understand that “yea,” is another way of saying, “hooray!” and “yeah,” is the slang version of “yes.” That is always the case.

3. I will never end sentences with prepositions at.

4. I will stop saying “loose” instead of “lose.” If something is loose that means it has too much space. If I lose, that means I don’t win.

5. I will learn the purpose of the semicolon; it is a meaningful punctuation tool.

6. I will never appear dumber than a second grader by misusing too/to/two or there/their/they’re. I will let slide, however, lay/lie/lain as nobody really cares about those.

7. I will learn some basic times when I should use “I” instead of “me.” For example, anytime I start a sentence, I will use I: “Roger and I went to the store.” Not, “Me and Roger went to the store.”

8. I will not tell myself the lie that spelling and grammar doesn’t matter. And I will use spellcheck.

9. I will tell myself ten times a day that apostrophes don’t make things plural.

10. I will not randomly capitalize words in the middle of sentences under the belief that it adds Emphasis and Weight to what I’m saying. I will use italics or bold for that.

11. I will make friends with adverbs, understanding that they describe verbs. As a result, I will always remind people to “go quickly,” and never to “go quick.” I may, however, still instruct people to “go real quick-like,” because it sounds adorable.

12. I will not add an extraneous letter “s” to things because I’m too lazy to listen to how it’s pronounced or cannot read how it is spelled. Bye bye, Meijers and Krogers.

13. I will not say “less,” when I mean “fewer.” Anything that I can put a number to should use fewer.

14. I will not say “impactful,” because that isn’t a word.

15. I will not say that I’m nauseous, unless there is something about me that is causing other people to feel ill. Instead, I will say that I am nauseated.

16. I will say “could have,” instead of “could of.” Because that is the correct thing to say, despite the fact that “could’ve” sounds like “could of.”

17. I will punch myself in the face if I ever use the word “literally.”

18. “Definitely.” I will definitely spell it correctly. D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y.