If you're a native English speaker and just want to avoid common grammatical errors in your writing (such as blog posts on your website) there are only a handful of rules that you need to memorize.

So this series of posts is for those who'd like to ditch the Grammarly crutch and just know what's right and what's not.

Here's the tenth one:

Affect and Effect

Because affect and effect are homophones (words that sound alike but have different spellings) they are often confused.

Let's clear that up.

Here's a simple rule that works most of the time.

"Affect" is a verb that produces an "effect". So in this sense, effect is the noun. But it can also be a verb. I'll come back to that.

Here's some examples.

"Bad weather always affects John's mood."

"The effect of bad weather on John is to put him in a bad mood."

Understand this and you've pretty much got it covered.

Here's an illustrative example of both in the one sentence:

"The medicine's side effect was to adversely affect Mary's digestive system."

Effect Used as a Verb

"Effect" can also be used as a verb, but it has a very clear meaning and is different from "affect" the verb.

It specifically means to bring something about or to make a change.

In fact, it's frequently used in conjunction with the word "change". For example:

"The students were hoping to effect a major change to college policy by their protest."

Conclusion

So there you have it. I hope the effect of this training is to positively affect your usage of these two words.

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Grammar 101: Affect and Effect