Usage Blooper: THEIR for THERE

As many of you know, I have been extremely busy this summer teaching business writing workshops around Alabama. I apologize for not keeping this blog as current as I should have, but my workshop participants have shared many great examples of grammar and usage issues, and I will try to share all of those with you in the coming days and weeks.

One usage goof that still pops up pretty consistently is confusion of THEIR and THERE. This example appeared in a book review in a newsletter someone shared with me last week:

This book explains why their were cotton mills in Roswell before the war....

Whoops! THEIR is the possessive form and can only be used when you are referring to something that belongs to a group of people, as in "The people of Roswell were proud of THEIR cotton mill."

The sentence above in red should have used THERE which, in this sense, is just a place holder at the beginning of the sentence:

This book explains why THERE were cotton mills in Roswell before the war....

The other use for THERE is to show location, as in "The mill is over THERE in that valley."

Now that that issue is cleared up, THERE should not be any reason for readers of this blog to confuse THEIR use of these two words!