The seven punctuation mistakes that make you look stupid include the following:

1. Being outsmarted by "smart quotes."
2. Using a hyphen as a dash or colon.
3. Using ellipses as a toy.
4. The old half-a-paren trick.
5. Using a comma between a label and labelee.
6. Leaving the apposition door open.
7. Using a semicolon where a comma would do.

Never before in history has a single language been as widely used as English. The number of English users in Asia alone is more or less equal to the number of Native English speakers worldwide: 350 million, more or less the combined populations of the United States, Britain and Canada.

The advent of the Internet has boosted English even further, about eighty percent of the world's electronically stored information is in English, and this widespread use of the language has caused an increase in the demand for English courses. An estimate by the British Council reports that today more than 1 billion people are learning English for work, study or leisure. China is strongly pushing English language in its schools, there are more Chinese children studying English as second language than there are Britons.

Those among the native English speakers who believe their language will soon be the standard for worldwide communication should think again:

Now that Dr. Language has provided a one-stop cure for the plague of misspelling, here are the 100 words most often mispronounced English words ("mispronunciation" among them). There are spelling rules in English even if they are difficult to understand, so pronouncing a word correctly usually does help you spell it correctly. Several common errors are the result of rapid speech, so take your time speaking, correctly enunciating each word. Careful speech and avid reading are the best guides to correct spelling.

With communication taking a leap from telegrams to text messages and from letters to e-mails, written English grammar has only become worse. Correct grammar can still be found in some official messages – that should be formal as well as semantically and syntactically correct. Communicating via the written word is a crucial part of human interaction. Before sending an important e-mail to a business colleague, one often asks himself/herself: “Will the message read better if the grammar is checked?”

This is where English Grammar Correction comes into picture. And if it’s online then it’s free, quick and efficient. Grammar checker works exactly like a spell checker, with the difference that the former is much more complicated. Online grammar check is a function that looks for the most commonly repeated English grammar mistakes. It searches for bad English patterns against its vast database of grammar mistakes.

Whether you're writing a resume, conducting a phone interview, or presenting a proposal, your success in the business world hinges upon your ability to effectively communicate your ideas.

Since the English language remains difficult even for native speakers to navigate, we've compiled a list of helpful resources and exercises for non-native English speakers to reduce the cultural divide and help you succeed in any form of communication and correspondence that the English speaking business world throws at you.

Students can Learn English grammar, vocabulary, verbs and speaking with games, a blog, and more.

Say you’re the CEO of a business and your project manager comes to you with his proposal that will be going out to investors, business partners, and potential clients.  Then you find that your manager has used “4” instead of “four”, “r” instead of “are”, and abbreviations such as lol, atm, and idk.  How would you react?  I thought so.

Erik wrote to me with a problem involving awkward writing.

"I am hoping you can give me feedback on something I run across frequently in my job at a bank. Many of our procedures and forms use what I call 'parenthetical plurals' -- for example, 'Place the ticket(s) in the basket.' When these parenthetical plurals become the subjects of sentences, things get awkward."

Most employers and recruiters agree that the top reason that makes them reject a resume is spelling mistakes. Some mistakes are so funny that we couldn’t let recruiters have all the fun and put together this list for your enjoyment.

First, let is be known that we are talking about punctuation and not our friend embedded into our digestive system!

Following the success of the article Guide to Comma Use the editor decided to put me back in the lions den and gave me the go ahead to write an article on the colon.

In the punctuation mark Christmas party, the colon would be considered an infrequent visitor: someone who pops their head in just to say hello and remind us, every now and again, that they still exist and working on trying to garner some backers to revive its fledgling career.

Here's a site with dozens of exercises and tests to help develop grammar, spelling, and vocabulary proficiency.

Select the correct word or phrase for each of the following 50 questions to test your knowledge of the most commonly confused words.

The 25 Most Commonly Misspelled Words is a list that has circulated among American businesses for decades. Two words have variant spellings for companies using British English spelling. Those two words are repeated at the end of the list of 25 words asking for the British spellings.

Business writers can avoid the problem of having supervisors, colleagues, and editors mark words as being misspelled by using the spellings preferred in their countries.

Two words also have variants that appear in dictionaries. However, business writers have clear preferences for one of the spellings and expect to see that spelling in business documents. We want you to know the preferred spellings so you avoid criticism.

Select the correct or preferred spelling in each of the following questions to test your spelling of the most commonly misspelled words.

Anyone can write a paragraph, but not everyone knows how to write one that other people want to read.

You’ve seen it:

You open a book, and the whole page is one long block of text.

Each sentence in the paragraph makes exactly the same point, said in a slightly different way, and you wonder why they didn’t just say it once and be done with it.

Every paragraph is the same length (five lines, maybe?), whether it makes sense or not, and it gives the piece a monotonous rhythm.

The paragraph makes a point without telling you why that point is important, and you can’t help thinking, “So what?”

Find out what common words people may be mistweeting.

If you've ever paused mid-stroke and thought "Does this need an apostrophe?" you'll want to take a peek at the apostrophe-use flowchart at Apostrophe.me for a cartoon-driven refresher.

The flowchart asks simple questions like "Is it plural?" and "Are you indicating possession?" to drive the flow through all the potential situations in which you would use an apostrophe. The flowchart ends with a gigantic piece of parting advice: When in doubt don't use an apostrophe. Apparently a lot of us get ourselves into a bit of trouble throwing around extra apostrophes with a little too much abandon. Even if you're a master of the apostrophe (and we suspect many of our attention-to-detail readers are), it could be worth sending on to someone you know who needs a little help from time to time.

These days, we tend to communicate via the keyboard as much as we do verbally . . . We try to invest a little care, avoiding mistakes so that there’s no confusion about what we’re saying and so that we look professional and reasonably bright. In general, we can slip up in a verbal conversation and get away with it. A colleague may be thinking, Did she just say “irregardless”?, but the words flow on, and our worst transgressions are carried away and with luck, forgotten.

If you are looking for a fun and interactive way to study English grammar, you can find almost everything you need on the Internet. There are exercises, tests, study guides, quizzes, and many other materials that make studying English grammar both simple and entertaining. Here are 20 resources to try:

Grammar Monster is an interactive and user-friendly program designed to revise (or teach) the use of punctuation and English grammar. It is aimed at native English speakers who are required to produce high-quality official correspondence.

Here are 50 tests that are useful in checking a person's business English skills. Answers are included are the end of the test.