Alive HR

A few years ago, my neighbors introduced their new baby, Lily, to me. Even as I congratulated them on the birth of their beautiful new daughter, I felt distracted, thinking, “Won’t they feel a little silly when they find out the correct spelling is Lilly?”

You can figure out the rest of the story. Of course, to my chagrin, I learned my neighbors were in fact correct; flying in the face of typical rules of English spelling and pronunciation, the flower is indeed spelled L-I-L-Y.

If it’s not already abundantly clear, let me come out and say that I make many mistakes in my writing. My grammar is not perfect. I overuse the passive voice and I sometimes conclude sentences with prepositions. Often, I use too many commas; other times not enough. And when I text from my phone’s virtual keyboard, I inflict a prodigious amount of typos upon my unfortunate readers.

With all my mistakes, I don’t intend to judge anyone with this post. That said, I see educated, professional (HR) people repeatedly making sloppy, elementary  mistakes that I believe detract from our collective credibility, errors that make us appear less educated and professional than we actually are. Some of the most frequent and basic errors concern contractions vs. possessives.

So this is my public service announcement. Please refer to my handy-dandy grid to help determine when to use you’re or your, who’s or whose, it’s or its.

As the astute reader will undoubtedly notice, I’ve made a number of grammatical errors in this post. Two points for each error you bring to light in the comments.