Week 6 - Affect and Effect

If someone were to come up to me in the middle of the night and threaten to kill me unless I could use the proper form of affect or effect in a sentence, I would have a 50 percent chance of living.
Get it? As funny as I am, it really is true. No matter how many times I study and read about the correct use of each, I continually get it wrong. Here is the common way to remember which is which:

• Affect is usually a verb. It means to impact or change 
• Effect is usually a noun. An effect is the result of a change.

One way that I am hoping to remember from now on, is going to be this picture I saw recently. I don't know if it will help anyone else, but it made me laugh, and I think it will be useful for me going forward.

The other most common mistake I find myself making, is with the words lie and lay. Every time I think I have it down and am choosing the write form, it ends up being the other. Well...except for this quiz, but I still don't have it down!
The best way I've found to remember the difference between the two, is that lay needs an object attached to it, but lie should not. For example: you might lay a book on the table, lay a sweater on the bed, or lay a child in her crib. When you feel tired at the end of the day, you may lie down. But you can’t lie a book anywhere, and you can’t lay down (no object) at the end of the day.
For this week, the mistake that I found out in the world was actually involving me. I wrote an article for The Signpost, and they spelled my last name wrong. How dare they...