When you choose On-Hold Marketing to write your scripts, edit your auto attendants and tutorials, or post to social media, you’re (not your) working with professionals who have post-secondary writing degrees, which means they will “write it right” so your print always looks great (not grate).
The English language has countless words that can be quite confusing with the only help being memorization or context. Relying on spell-check is often not helpful in these instances.
Writing right can be confusing
With emoticons and acronyms taking over much of our written language, it has become even more difficult to remember the correct use and spelling of many words; a challenge for even the most “correct” users of the English language. And nothing is more confusing than homonyms…homonyms?…what is that? You know (or is it no), those pesky words that sound the same but are spelled differently (homophones) …or are spelled the same, sound the same, but have different meanings (homographs) …or the ones that are spelled the same but don’t sound the same and have different meanings (homonyms).
At On-Hold Marketing, we understand that you don’t always have the luxury of having a professional writer in your back pocket, so here are a few tips to easily remember how to use some of the most commonly misused homophones.
- To…is used most of the time
- Too… if you can exchange with “also”
- Two … the number “2”
- Here – a place
- Hear – you do it with your ear – see how ear and hear are spelled the same…
- Their (you can replace with his or hers)
- There (a place – if you can “sort of” use here)
- They’re (can be replaced with they are)
- Your (it belongs to you)
- You’re (can be replaced with you are)
- Yore (a long time ago)
- Where – a question (you can answer with here)
- Were – past tense of are
- We’re – we are
- Then – is time – spell this way if you can say when
- Than – is a comparison
- Compliment – praise
- Complement – enhance; go together… remember to use “e” as in “complete”
A helpful example
You’re late because your timeline had been updated. If you had read the red highlight, you would know that there was no space available and that you would have had to punch in the number two, too! Where were you? We proceeded without you, but you did get a compliment on the music that complemented the text.
Read our article ‘Do I Have to Write My On-Hold Script?‘ if you are concerned about writing your own phone message.
“If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers.” – Doug Larson