Amy Williams - Week 6

This week’s “Right Words” assignment was a little difficult for me. There were a couple words that tripped me up, but I have a plan for how to remember them in the future.

First, I was stuck with “Flyers/Fliers” right off the bat. I knew that the papers were “fliers,” so I assumed that the airplanes were “flyers.” Nope! Both are fliers, which will be easy to remember in the future. I’ll remember it because I remember the paper “fliers,” and now I know “flyers” isn’t a word.

Affect and effect have always been an issue for me, and I know this is a pretty common problem. I have a hard time remembering them, because I can never think of a trick to jog my memory. I searched the internet for something that might help me and I found this image. I hope it helps you too!

Another one that always trips me up, and I know this is pretty common as well, is lie vs lay. I found a great explanation on writersdigest.com: “Lay and lie are both present-tense verbs, but they don’t mean quite the same thing. Lay means to put or set something down, so if the subject is acting on an object, it’s ‘lay.’ For example, I lay down the book. You, the subject, set down the book, the object. Lie, on the other hand, is defined as, ‘to be, to stay or to assume rest in a horizontal position,’ so the subject is the one doing the lying—I lie down to sleep or When I pick up a copy of my favorite magazine, Writer’s Digest, I lie down to take in all its great information—and not acting on an object. In both these cases, you, the subject, are setting yourself down.” This explanation helped me greatly, and I also found another photo to jog my memory:

The grammatical error I found this week was at a gas station. It said “Are bathrooms are out of order.” It should have said, “OUR bathrooms are out of order.”