diff --git a/HACKING.md b/HACKING.md
index 9053fc5bf..e57431f12 100644
--- a/HACKING.md
+++ b/HACKING.md
@@ -22,14 +22,14 @@ To start a ephemeral virtual machine using this repository, run:
     tools/deploy-qemu IMAGE tools/deploy/test
 
 `IMAGE` has to be a path to an cloud-init-enabled image matching the host
-operating system, because that's what the packages where built for above.
+operating system, because that's what the packages were built for above.
 Note that the Fedora/RHEL cloud images might be too small for some tests
 to pass. Run `qemu-img resize IMAGE 10G` to grow them, cloud-init's growpart
 module will grow the root partition automatically during boot. 
 
 The second argument points to a directory from which cloud-init user-data is
 generated (see `tools/gen-user-data` for details). The one given above tries to
-mimick what is run on *osbuild-composer*'s continuous integration
+mimic what is run on *osbuild-composer*'s continuous integration
 infrastructure, i.e., installing `osbuild-composer-tests` and starting the
 service.