The common mistakes / Shahrul Amri Ab Wahab

Firstly, let me admit that my English is far from perfect. In fact, it might not even fall in the ‘good’ category although I managed to obtain 8 as my overall IELTS score. But when it comes to grave grammatical mistakes, I believe I am good enough to spot them. So here I am, daring myself to write on the oft- committed mistakes in English among Malaysians (aside from trying to fulfil my annual KPI for publication). So here goes. Let’s begin with ‘let’s’. I often stumbled upon phrases like ‘let say’ and ‘lets say’ being written by many other people. In this context it is neither ‘let’ nor ‘lets’, it is supposed to be ‘let us (verb)’ or ‘let’s (verb)’ – both literally mean the same, but the latter is the contraction of the former, just like I’m for I am. ‘Let’ and ‘lets’ could be used in sentences like these instead: ‘we let them stay for a week’, or ‘he lets the cat in every morning’.