Spence 1 Dominique Spence Mrs.

Jessie Carty English 1101 12 November 2013 Discourse Community When it comes to grammar everyone has a topic that they hate or wish that people would finally get right. What erks me the most is the common misusage of there, their and theyre. From elementary learning to social media, everyone seems to struggle with the proper usage of these nouns. Grammar is a complex subject and something we will never be able to ignore. There, their and there are considered homophones- words that sound the same but are completely different in meaning. Other homophones in the English grammar include except and accept and by, buy and bye. Homophones may sometimes in be spelled the same such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense for rise). These instances allow there, their and theyre to sometimes be difficult to fully understand and write with. There represents a specified or unspecified place and can also be used to show that something exists. This word indicates where something is and where it goes. There can also be used in many different parts of speech such as an adverb, pronoun, noun and adjective. There can be used as an opening of a sentence such as There is or There are. An example of the usage of there would be: Put the chair over there. or There is an apple in the kitchen. Both examples of there represent the meaning of place and being. When in doubt there is the likely form to use. Another form of this homophone is the plural possessive adjective their. Their is used to describe something that belongs to them. Their is used just like his, her, my, and your. They

Spence 2 all show possession and what belongs where. A noun typically follows their and it has no other job in the English language than as an adjective. Just like the example, The boys left their homework at school, you can see that the possession is given to the boys because the homework belongs to them. Theyre is the last homophone of the group. Theyre is the contraction of they are meaning it can only be substituted with they are. One example would be the sentence, Theyre going to soccer practice. In the sentence theyre can be substituted with they are and the sentence would still have the same meaning that it did before. Autocorrect Why its a problem? Why does it happen? How to fix it.

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