Zap! Don’t you wish you could easily substitute the right word for an incorrect one? Here, the Grammar Cop will help you. Check these out!

1. My mother, in town to see my children and I through the divorce, wanders into my doorway, waiting for me to tell her what is wrong.
2. In a Marquette poll in June, Biden lead Trump 50 to 44 percent in a state that the president narrowly carried in 2016.
3. Explore mindfulness and the practices of self-compassion, loving kindness, gratitude as well as others, one breathe at a time.

And the corrections:

1. Did you spot it? Hint: “my children and I.” It should be my children and me – because in this sentence, the phrase is the object of the verb “to see.” (If the phrase was the subject, you’d say – for example – My children and I went through a tough time.)(And we did! But that’s for another blog post! 😉)
2. So: the poll was in June, i.e. that was in the past. Right? Therefore the verb “lead” should be in the past tense. Well then: the past tense of the verb “lead” is led. It’s a common mistake, because many people seem to think that “lead” should follow the same rule as the verb, “read.” But it doesn’t. The past tense of “read” is spelled the same as the present. (English is weird, right? Right!)
3. Here’s another case of a lazy proofreader, or lack thereof.  It should say one breath at a time. The funny thing is that the sentence that came before this one (I spared you the chore of reading it!) contains the word “breathe” correctly spelled, as a verb. But when used as a noun, the word is breath – the “e” is dropped.

Note that in the above examples, no spell checker would find the errors, because the wrong words used are still spelled correctly. They’re just used incorrectly in their contexts. Luckily the Grammar Cop’s brain has a fairly large hard drive chock-full of this stuff, and she just loves sharing it all with you lucky FF fans! Now have a great week and see you back here next Friday!