(I really liked my "word nerd" blog last week, so I'm going to attempt to make this a regular feature... It's kind of sad how much I like writing about grammar.)
For some of us, it’s intuitive. It makes others want to run screaming from the room. It’s the decision on whether to use “there,” “their” or “they’re.” When you’re talking, it doesn’t really matter which of the three you’ve got in your head because they all sound the same. But, in writing, few things will paint you as uneducated or ignorant in the mind of your reader than screwing up there/their/they’re.
“There” is the sort-of opposite of “here,” and that’s easy to remember because you can’t spell “there” without “here.” Are you referring to a location, either actual (“over there”) or metaphorical (“There are four houses on that street”)? Then this “there” is the one you want.
“Their” is possessive; you will only use it when writing that something belongs to a group of people, as in “Their house is on that street.” (It never, never, never has an apostrophe.) At times you'll need to write "theirs" ("That car of theirs wakes me up every morning. They need to replace the @*&^ muffler") - again, no apostrophe, ever, ever, ever.
“They’re” is the simplest in many ways. It’s a contraction of “they are,” and as with all contractions (“you’re” and “it’s” included) you can determine when to use this one by breaking into its parts. You wouldn’t say “They are four houses on that street,” or “They are house is one with that awful crepe mytrle out front.” So, when you think you might want to write “they’re,” just take a second to imagine the sentence with the contraction spelled out. And 99.9 percent of the time you’ll have your answer.
Next time: does that “s” on the end of your word need an apostrophe?
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