Homophones.

We should all have learned long ago that special list of words that sound the same and yet are spelled differently and have very different meanings. But that was a long time ago, so sometime in the flurry of writing, the wrong word quietly sneaks in and settles down unobtrusively in a sentence. Perhaps you forgot the difference. Maybe you never knew. More likely, you are thinking about the overall story and message and your brain is focused on other details. This is where a good editor comes in handy. This would be a living, breathing type of editor – grammar check will often skip these types of errors as long as you’ve used a legitimate word.

Here’s my cautionary tail tale on this topic for today.

I would never “role” with the punches. And while I love to eat rolls (especially my grandmother’s), I would never eat a “role.” And yet, in a recent piece I wrote, I had someone play a roll. This would have been fine had it been a story about a grade school drama about food that had other children playing the parts of milk, cheese, jam and cake. But, of course, these are all roles.

So to recap, we roll down the hill, we order rolls at restaurants, and our role is to help people tell their story.