Archive for July 1st, 2009

It happens to all of us. We’re busily writing a letter or email and suddenly we doubt if a word we just typed is the right one for the situation. Personally, I always have a hard time keeping “it’s” and “its” straight. Maybe you struggle with “your” and “you’re” or “advice” and “advise.”

In fact, there are a number of words that commonly confuse lots of people. To help you out, here’s a guide to some of the ones that I see most frequently in the editing work that I do.

Its & It’s

Its means of or belonging to it.

It’s is the contraction of “it is.”

It’s just amazing the way the dog can sense when its owner is about to come home.

Their & They’re

Their means of or relating to them.

They’re is the contraction of “they are.”

They’re flying to Chicago to visit their cousins.

Whose & Who’s

Whose means of or relating to whom.

Who’s is the contraction of “who is” or “who has.”

Whose turn is it to pick up the guest who’s arriving on the 2:00 train?

Your & You’re

Your means of or relating to you or yourself.

You’re is the contraction of “you are.”

You’re doing a fabulous job sticking to your diet.

Advice & Advise

Advice is a noun that means guidance or counsel.

Advise is a verb that means to counsel or give advice to.

My advice to you is that you advise your staff to answer the telephone promptly.

Complement & Compliment

Complement (as a noun) means something that completes; complement (as a verb) means to complete.

Compliment (as a noun) means praise or a favorable remark; compliment (as a verb) means to praise.

“I would like to compliment the chef,” said Ralph, “for the way the flavors of this dish complement each other so perfectly.”

Insure, Ensure & Assure

While all 3 of these words relate to guaranteeing that something is true or that something will happen, there are subtle differences in their usages:

Assure means to say, write or confirm the guarantee.

Ensure means to do something to make certain that something happens.

Insure means to guarantee something with insurance or other financial instruments.

“Let me assure you that there’s no need to worry,” he said. “While your firewall will ensure that hackers don’t get into your system, this new policy will insure you against loss in case your system goes down.”

This is an event I’ll be speaking where we’ll talk about integrating User Experience with Agile methodologies. This is a reschedule of the canceled event.

Here’s some of the information:

Scrum provides us with a great framework for building our Scrum team, implementing the core agile practices and getting the inspect and adapt process started. But Scrum doesn’t provide much for the specific disciplines like programming, testing and User Experience. That’s where our coaches Patrick Neeman and Michael Vincent come in.

Join us as we explore how User Experience Design integrates with the Scrum process. We’ll see first hand how each type of activity fits into the Scrum cycles, and how our User Experience researchers, designers and artists integrate into a Scrum team.

The address is:

Blankspaces
5405 Wilshire Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

The event will start at 7:00 p.m.

And Michael Vincent’s bio:

Mike Vincent is a solutions architect based in Orange County, California. He supports clients with application lifecycle management as a senior consultant with Accentient, and provides software architecture and development services focusing on Microsoft .NET technology as principle architect withMVA Software. He has been in the software business for over 20 years in addition to engineering and marketing management positions.  Actively involved in the user group community since the early 90′s, Mike is Vice President of INETA Noram. He founded both the SoCal .Net Architecture group which is now also IASA’s SoCal Chapter and the Orange County C# Developers group, now OC .NET. Mike is a frequent presenter at user groups, regional events, and code camps. He is a Visual Studio Team System MVP. Currently, he is working with the Scrum Alliance on a forthcoming program. mvasoftware.com