Why do so many people confuse "your" and "you're"

coureur
Sat, 06 Oct 2007 17:52:45 +0000

It’s just a simple case of switching homophones. People do it all the time. Doesn’t make it good or right, but it’s a very common and basically innocent mistake.

There, their, they’re
Your, you’re
To, too, two
hour, our
its, it’s
Whose, who’s and so on.

The thing to remember is that, with our phonetic writing system, the words on the page do not represent ideas or concepts as do say Chinese characters; they represent sounds. So when cruising along and typing a line of text, especially at high speed, it’s very easy for the brain to seize on the wrong word and type it because it sounds correct. Your brain has inserted the correct sound in the sentence but just not the correct spelling of that sound. When written that sentence will be a problem, but when spoken aloud the sentence will be perfectly correct.