You don’t have to look far to find examples of typos or grammar errors in tweets posted by celebrities. Of course, everyone makes mistakes sometimes, and in certain cases, a mistake may be as innocent as an autocorrect fail. If you’re a celebrity, though, your followers may not let your mistake slide without retweeting and commenting on it first. After all, for us mortals, celebrity Twitter mistakes can be humanizing and, we’ll admit it, even be a bit entertaining.
Teachers in are showing, however, that celebrity Twitter typos aren’t just entertaining; they can also be educational. These teachers know that grammar can be pretty dry, so they’re mixing things up in the classroom by having students correct the grammar errors and typos in real celebrity tweets. If you’re an educator, you can even download celebrity tweet worksheet packages to use in your classroom.
Think your grammar is as good as a fourth grader’s? See if you can identify the errors in each of the celebrity tweets below. As an added challenge, we’ve blurred out the twitter handles so that you also have to guess who posted the tweet. Good luck!
Tweet # 1
Can you guess the error and user?
Answers
Error: This tweet contains a spelling mistake. The celebrity who posted it meant to write “honor.”
Celebrity: Donald Trump (The references to a “poll” and “the debate” might have given this one away.)
Tweet # 2
Can you guess the error and user?
Answers
Error: Setting aside the slang terms, this tweet makes an interesting (as in nonexistent) use of the possessive (e.g., “me and Jay-Z single”). You can correct the error by rephrasing this part of the tweet (e.g., “the single Jay-Z and I created”).
Celebrity: Kanye West (The reference to an infamous VMA incident should have been a major clue.)
Tweet # 3
Can you guess the error and user?
Answers
Error: This tweet contains a comma splice. In the last sentence, the words on each side of the comma can stand on their own as full sentences. In a case like this, you need to use either a period or a semicolon.
Celebrity: Lady Gaga
Tweet # 4
Can you guess the error and user?
Answers
Error: It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks like this celebrity added an extra word (e.g., “at”) to this tweet. Note that because of just this one extra word, the tweet is hard to understand the first few times you read it. You can fix the error by removing the extra word.
Celebrity: Iggy Azalea
Tweet # 5
Can you guess the error and user?
Answers
Error: We’ve got more spelling mistakes here. “Columbia” should be “Colombia” and “Philippians” should be “Philippines.” These mistakes are made all the more worse by the fact that they were the celebrity’s second public blunder of the evening involving Miss Colombia and Miss Philippines.
Celebrity: Steve Harvey (tweeting about his mistake when announcing the 2016 winner of Miss Universe)
Bonus Tweet
Although some celebrities may not care that much about the errors they make in their tweets, others find the thought of making a typo absolutely mortifying. As a final challenge, can you guess the celebrity who would rather have her pants split at a presidential event than make a typo on Twitter?
Answer: Lena Dunham
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