HOME: Tips For Writers
How to avoid the most common writing errors
Sometimes, despite a writer's best intentions, errors just creep in – almost of their own accord, it seems. Let's face it, we all see so much inexpert writing around us that bad habits can easily take hold in our minds unnoticed.
This page lays out (in no particular order) some of the habits best avoided. If you can catch yourself before committing any of these faux pas, you'll be much better able to produce good, clean copy – free of the mistakes in grammar, spelling, punctuation and syntax that other writers may fall prey to.
LET’S LEAD OFF with one of the biggest stumbling blocks to easy reading: the tendency to use big, long, important-sounding words when short ones will do the job better. I’ve assembled some of my least-favourite specimens into this (rather unlikely) “bad example” sentence:
Prior to exiting the drinking establishment, the individual purchased and consumed numerous beverages
Translated into plain English:
Before leaving the bar, the person bought and knocked back many drinks
Bureaucrats would be sure to prefer the former; good writers favour the latter. Shorter words are punchier and more reader-friendly.
“ACTIVATE” YOUR WRITING by using verbs instead of nouns. For instance, an organization should “determine” its course of action, rather than “come to a determination about” it. Say “I understand,” not “my understanding of the issue is.” This will make your prose more vigorous and less wordy.
Another strategy is to cut out all “-ation” noun forms, and instead use gerunds – the “-ing” form:
I believe in the harmonization of both principles =
I believe in harmonizing both principles
The best result would come from the application of this principle =
The best result would come from applying this principle
Gerunds, in fact, are the unsung heroes of vigorous writing. Using them picks up the pace of your writing, and gives a feeling of energy.
IN NORTH AMERICA, commas and periods go inside quote marks – not outside, as is done in England. Colons and semi-colons, question marks and exclamation marks go outside the quote marks, though, unless they’re part of the quote.
Another English habit that’s surprisingly common in this country is repurposing apostrophes as quote marks – that is, using single marks. In Canada, though, quote marks should always be double. The only place for single quote marks is in a “nested” quote, when one quote appears inside another:
“He told me, ‘I don’t like the idea’ ”
(And at the end of such a phrase, always remember to close off both sets of quote marks, the single and the double.)
REMEMBER THAT “IT’S” is a contraction of the words “it is.”
Many people make this mistake (even ones who ought to know better, such as teachers, writers and other professionals). Still, the rule is actually quite simple: in English, an apostrophe always means that a letter has been left out – and in this case, what’s been left out is the missing “i” of “is.”
I often wonder at this general tendency to put apostrophes where they don’t belong. The only explanation that occurs to me is that many people confuse contraction and possession. In English, we almost always add an <‘s> to a regular word to signify a possessive: Charlie’s aunt, Jim’s book. Perhaps many people erroneously believe that “the dog chased its tail” should really be “the dog chased it’s tail” (since the tail is certainly the dog’s property).
Here's how to get it right: just mentally expand the contraction. “The dog chased it is tail” – does that make sense? No, so the apostrophe doesn’t belong there.
IN FACT, CONFUSION about how to use apostrophes correctly is now so widespread that many people (perhaps just to be on the safe side) stick them in before any “s” at the end of a word – even for plurals. (In England, this is dubbed “the grocer’s apostrophe,” because its use is most common among uneducated shopkeepers.) We’ve all seen those signs in stores: “100’s of CD’s in stock” or “Giant Sale on All Coat’s.” All wrong, sadly. There ARE some tricky plurals in the English language, but none of them involves inserting an apostrophe.
THE WORD “COMPRISES” means “consists of.” Many people tend to think of it as a fancy variant of “is composed of,” but the derivation is quite different. So if you see a sentence like this:
The board is comprised of representatives from several organizations
– remember to mentally substitute the right usage: take out the “is” and the “of,” and correct the verb form. The phrase should now read:
The board comprises representatives of several organizations
WHEN A DATE is given in full, with month, day and year – as in: “The group incorporated on Feb. 3, 1996” – the month name should be abbreviated, with a period at the end (except for May, June and July, which are short enough not to need one). There should also be a comma between the day and the year.
But when only the month is given – as in, “The committee published its report in August 1999” – there’s no need for a comma between month and year; and the month name is written in full.
As well, don’t be too date-happy. If you refer to a conference that took place Sept. 12-15, 2001, it’s fine to just say “September” – unless, of course, you want to avoid confusion with a very similar conference that took place Sept. 23-26.
MY HANDY MNEMONIC: the “CN Tower Rule” helps me to remember how to spell words such as “practice,” “licence,” etc. Here in Canada, we spell these with a “C” if the word is a Noun (and with an “S” if it’s a Verb, but the “the SV Rule” sounds so much less snappy). Thus:
Agent 007 is licensed to kill
But:
Agent 007 renewed his dog licence
This is particularly an issue when writers adapt American material. However, Canadian usage is gradually moving toward spelling both nouns AND verbs with a C. When in doubt, do that – you’ll be less likely to err.
UNLIKE IN THE States, in Canada we spell “labour” and similar words with a “u,” rather than shortening them to “labor”; and we go to the “theatre” rather than to the “theater.” Still, be aware that U.S. references still get to keep their native spelling – the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for instance, are located in Atlanta, so the spelling is correct for that specific place.
(Another U.S./Canadian oddity: we “double up” consonants at the end of verbs, whereas they don’t. We say “traveller,” they say “traveler”; we say “labelled,” they say “labeled”; and so on.)
DO YOU KNOW the difference between “lie” and “lay”? It’s very simple: “lie” is an intransitive verb, meaning it doesn’t take an object. The only thing you can “lie” down is yourself:
I can’t wait to lie down and have a nice nap
However, “lay” is a transitive verb, meaning it requires an object: you don’t just lay, you lay something:
I can’t wait to lay down this heavy backpack
(One possible source of confusion may be the old prayer, written in those old-fashioned days when people could apparently be the object of their own sentence: "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." But even there, the verb takes an object: “me.”)
IF AN ASSEMBLAGE of people is indicated by a noun, that noun counts as singular when it comes to verb forms and pronouns. You may often see lines like this:
The group notified all their member organizations
That should, of course, be:
The group notified all its member organizations.
SPEAKING OF SINGULARS and plurals, here’s one word that's frequently misused: “media.” That’s the plural form – the singular term is “medium.” Television is a broadcast medium, and a magazine is a print medium, but together both are examples of the mass media. So we say “the media are,” not “the media is.”
In fact, our language contains several words (usually ones derived from Latin and Italian) whose plural form is commonly believed to be the singular. One such is “data”: a researcher might write:
The data clearly indicates that the treatment works
That would be wrong; what he ought to say is:
The data clearly INDICATE that the treatment works
However, unlike media/medium, this particular word really HAS no singular form; the correct word, “datum,” is just too little-known to be a valid option. (A similar case is “fora,” the correct plural of “forum” – but who’s ever heard of it?) Even the strictest grammarians may eventually have to give in and accept data as a singular noun, just because everyone uses it that way.
IN THE SAME vein, foreign words are a rich source of confusion when it comes to singulars and plurals. Common examples are phenomena, criteria, dice, vertebrae, and (if you’re into coffee culture) biscotti. These are all plurals: the singular forms are, respectively, phenomenon, criterion, die, vertebra and biscotto.
RUNNING VERSUS BARNACLES. One common misuse that purists (such as me) are always grumbling about is the word “careen” – used by many people nowadays to mean “racing around out of control”:
The runaway bus careened down the steep mountain road
This is a classic example of confusing a word with one that sounds almost the same, but has a very different meaning. “Careening” is what sailors do to ships when they drag them ashore and lean them over to scrape barnacles off the hull. It’s a pretty archaic and specialized term.
What people really want to say is “careering” – meaning dashing madly or erratically. It comes from the French “courir,” meaning to run – the same source from whence we get “courier,” the guy who races madly around town on a bike delivering your urgent letters.
Granted, it IS a bit odd to be using this word as a verb: we’re used to speaking of “our careers” in terms of the work we do. But it’s the correct word, with no connotations of crustaceans.
LEAVE THE LATIN. We all remember those little Latin terms, “i.e.” and “e.g.”, that we learned in school. (For those whose memories are a bit fuzzy, “i.e.” is short for “id est,” meaning “that is”; and “e.g.” stands for “exempli gratia,” or “for example.”) They may be space-saving, but at a cost: today these phrases have a rather old-fashioned and pedantic air – one that’s better suited to academic work than to most common uses. Avoid them, and prefer expressions like “that is,” “such as,” or “including.”
SHORTEN OR NOT: One consistency problem that bedevils a lot of writers is the use of contractions: words like “aren’t” for “are not”, and “that’s” for “that is.” Either style is fine: the full version is more formal, the shortened form less so. But be consistent. I often see the two styles mixed, sometimes even within the same sentence:
There’s lots of material available, but it is not always suitable for children
If “there’s” is acceptable to this writer, then the other contraction should correspond: “it’s” (or “isn’t”). Conversely, if it's felt that “is not” is the better phrase, the other should match: “there is,”
There’s lots of material available, but it’s not always suitable for children
There is lots of material available, but it is not always suitable for children
THE MISUSE OF “as such” seems to be on the rise, with a lot of people using it as (they think) a synonym for “as a result” or “hence” or “therefore.” An example:
Women today are often too time-stressed to cook. As such, many appreciate pre-made meals
Here's the problem: because “such” is a pronoun, it needs both a “completing” statement to follow (which it usually gets), and – more importantly – an antecedent, a clear subject it refers back to. That's where many people get confused. Consider this correct use:
I am the head of this organization, and as such [i.e. as the head] I feel it is my duty to act decisively
One could fix that first example easily enough, with a bit of tweaking to insert a correct antecedent:
"Many women are time-stressed, and as such [i.e. as time-stressed women] they appreciate pre-made meals.
THE PROPER USE of acronyms is a problem writers often wrestle with – especially in government text, where the device is frequently over-used. Even though it’s a convenient space-saver, it’s not always a user-friendly one. Unless you really like your copy to look like alphabet soup, I recommend keeping the use of acronyms to a minimum.
We all know that the proper way to introduce an acronym is to give the long form first, then the abbreviation in brackets:
Bob works for the National Research Council (NRC)
However, if you never refer to the NRC again in your text, you can safely leave out that acronym.
Another aspect to consider is that nowadays, many acronyms are actually more familiar to readers than the names or phrases they represent. Say NATO, and everyone knows what you mean; refer to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and people might say “Huh?”
And in less formal text, it’s my view that one can generally trust the reader’s intelligence to connect an organization name in one sentence with an acronym in the next – to figure out, for instance, that the Egg Marketing Board of Canada is the likeliest source of the “EMBC” in the following line.
THE PROPER DISTINCTION between “that” and “which” bedevils even professional writers. The difference is that they’re used for defining and non-defining clauses.
A “defining clause” imparts information needed to identify exactly which person or thing, out of many possible ones, is under discussion right now. It doesn’t need any commas, and generally opens with “that.”
The lawnmower that’s in the garage belongs to Tim; the one out back is mine
A “non-defining clause” gives more information about the one person or thing that we already know to be under discussion. It’s set off by commas, and opens with “which.”The lawnmower, which is in the garage, is broken
The first sentence identifies a specific lawnmower, Tim’s – one of two you could be talking about. That makes this a defining clause: notice, no commas and a “that.” The second sentence just gives extra information about one particular lawnmower – it’s broken, and it’s in the garage. That makes it a non-defining clause, set off by commas and containing a “which.”
THERE’S A COMMON belief that when a sentence begins with a conjunction such as “and,” “or,” or “but,” it takes a comma right after it – as in:
Or, we could take in a movie instead
Yet, his misgivings didn’t stop him joining in
But, many people feel differently
This isn’t at all necessary. A single word doesn’t count as a separate clause, and too many commas make the text look awkward.
WE USUALLY SEPARATE adjectives with commas when there’s even a short list of them. Most people don't care one way or the other about commas, but editors can often get quite worked up about them – especially about which is preferable: the serial (or Oxford) comma, or the non-serial comma.
An example of the serial comma would be:
That web site gives bigoted, inaccurate, and misleading information
The non-serial-comma version would read:
That web site gives bigoted, inaccurate and misleading information
(Notice the first sentence has a comma after “inaccurate,” the second one doesn’t.)
Which style you choose is really just a matter of personal (or client) preference. Personally, I'm a non-serial gal: I have too much respect for the humble, hard-working comma to gratuitously toss it around where it’s not really needed.
ANOTHER ADJECTIVE-COMMA twist: two or more adjectives that modify the same noun need a comma between them; but adjectives that modify each other don’t.
Example 1: She dreamed of a tall, dark, handsome stranger
In this example, the stranger was tall, he was dark, and he was handsome. All the adjectives modify the same noun, “stranger”; they’re all of roughly the same importance to the sentence; and grammatically speaking, it doesn’t really matter which order they go in.
Here's a different situation:
Example 2: He shot the angry, charging white rhino
This tells us three very different things: that the rhino was of the white species, that the rhino was charging, and that it was angry. The third adjective [white] modifies the noun [rhino], whereas the first and second adjectives [angry and charging] modify the whole adjective-noun combination [white rhino]. The adjectives are NOT of the same syntactical weight: one is more important to the noun than the other, and the two have to work together in the correct sequence.
Many people make the mistake of confounding the two forms, inserting commas when they’re not necessary and leaving them out when they ARE necessary. The second is the less serious error: “a tall dark stranger” (no commas) grates a good deal less on the sensitive ear than this kind of thing:
Many connoisseurs disdain strong, Australian, red wine
Think about it: the modifiers strong, Australian and red need be applied to the wine in a certain order of importance. The wine’s main characteristic is being red; it’s made in Australia; and it’s also strong.
If you’re in doubt about whether a comma is needed, think of The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy and her friends followed the yellow brick road, not the yellow, brick road. It’s a classic Example 2: the road was brick, and the brick road was yellow.
ONE OF MY bêtes noires is the current tendency to insert “of” after “off”:
He jumped off of the bridge
They kicked me off of the team
Can’t take my eyes off of you
This is totally unnecessary! “Off” is a perfectly good and effective preposition in its own right, and needs no help – the “of” is always redundant and wrong.
WHEN INTRODUCING LISTS, “the following” is almost never necessary; and neither, most of the time, is an introductory colon. A typical sentence might read:
The responsibilities of the umbrella arts group include the following: campaigning for increased funding, advocating for small fringe groups, and raising public awareness.
Neither the colon nor “the following” are necessary; it’s quite legitimate just to say:
The group’s responsibilities include campaigning and advocating (etc.)
INCONSISTENT CAPITALIZATION IS a common problem, especially in titles and headings. The rules are simple: if your title or head is “upstyle” (in “title case,” with all first letters capitalized) then every word over four letters long should be capitalized. (That’s a rule somebody made up, and we all follow it. Don’t ask me why, it just is.) The important words get capped; but all the little prepositions, conjunctions, etc., in between take a small first letter. Some examples:
Premier to Officiate at Games
All the important words are capped, but the “to” and the “at” aren’t.
Premier Promises Aid to Games
The word “aid” has only three letters – but it’s a noun, and clearly an integral part of the sentence, so it gets a capital letter.
Premier Vows Pipeline Won’t Run Through Park
“Through” is just a conjunction, but it’s longer than four letters, so it gets capitalized.
However, if your heading or title is “downstyle” or in “sentence case” (as many newspaper headlines are nowadays), then only the first letter of the first word is capped, just like a regular sentence:
Premier to officiate at event
The exception is when you use words in a downstyle head that are always capitalized, such as proper names or titles:
Thousands cheer Pope’s visit
Former Beatle George Harrison dies
To be consistent, just figure out whether you prefer upstyle or downstyle – and then keep track of the exceptions.
CAPITALIZATION CAN ALSO be a thorny problem when you’re using compound words: an adjective or noun with two parts that are separated by a hyphen. If you’re using an upstyle heading, then both parts of a compound expression must be capitalized:
The Joys of In-Line Skating
Trials of a Live-In Nanny
Show is Off-Broadway Success
Often, people only think to capitalize the first part (Live-in Nanny); but to be correct, both “Live” and “In” need the capital letter.
In a downstyle headline, the rule is reversed for words that usually ARE capitalized:
Show is off-Broadway success.
ANOTHER SOURCE OF confusion involves compound terms that sometimes need hyphens, and sometimes don’t. I could give up editing and retire in luxury if I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen a sign saying “Thank-you for your cooperation” or “Please pick-up after your dog.”
The first writer was probably thinking of a “thank-you letter,” in which the “thank you” (used as a compound adjectival phrase modifying the noun “letter”) DOES take a hyphen. He obviously just assumed that the hyphen always has to be there, even for the stand-alone verb phrase “thank you.”
Same for the other example. Pick-up time may be nine o’clock, and a game of pick-up hockey may be fun; but picking up after a dog is simply an ordinary compound verb – no hyphen required.
ALTHOUGH MUCH OF the English language is carved in stone (and we language mavens like to keep it that way!), nowadays many correct spellings of new words are up for grabs. This is particularly true of modern technology such as the Internet.
English is a wonderfully adaptive language, and remarkably clever at creating and integrating new words. (Remember when the word “fax” first entered the dictionary?) New words are generally capitalized to begin with, while they’re still unfamiliar; and as they become more commonplace, the upper-case style is often dropped. “Internet” – along with its contraction, the Net, and the catch-all term “World Wide Web” – are often seen capitalized. But the industry is now starting to downstyle them: we see “e-mail” written in lower-case (and often without the hyphen), and “website” with a small “w.”
With respect to the latter, there’s also on ongoing debate as to whether one word or two is best. My own preference is for lower-case and one word: I now prefer website to web site, Web site or Website.
IN MY VIEW, two of the most overused minor words in English are “of” and “that.” (One editing colleague always conducts a search for both words, and deletes most of those she finds.) There are many redundant ways to use “of”; see above for my most-disliked fashion, the infamous “off of.” Others are most often seen in connection with “most” and “the”:
Most of the people I know dislike this usage
That could be rephrased more simply as:
Most people I know dislike this.
AS FOR “THAT”: the word is a useful one, and vital in some contexts. It’s often not necessary, though, especially in informal usage – few people say, “I think that I’ll go swimming” when the easier phrase is just “I think I’ll go swimming.”
But some subordinate clauses absolutely require a “that” to make proper sense. Look at this sentence (especially if it breaks across the end of a line):
The investigation revealed the document
had been forged
As a reader, you’d definitely stumble over that. On first reading, it looks as though “the document” is the direct object of the word “revealed”; so your brain automatically expects the second line to say “to be hidden in a wall safe,” or some such.
But what the investigation really revealed (though the writer failed to make this clear) was the fact of the forgery. The words “the fact that” are implicit in the short form “that” – yet the writer chose not to bother making this clear. The confusion could have been avoided if he’d instead written:
The investigation revealed that the document had been forged.
AN ADVERB ENDING in “-ly” takes no hyphen after it. That’s a commonly known (not a commonly-known) fact. Don’t ask why, it just is. Nicely dressed, thickly coated, mortifyingly wrong – all are hyphenless.
BULLETED LISTS AND short memories are a tricky combination, often leading to a grammatical sin known as incorrect parallelism. In many lists, the first two or three bullets follow correctly from the introductory statement – but after that, the writer often forgets what he’s about. Look at this example (provided by an editing colleague who's perhaps excessively irked by such things):
When confronted with a poor parallelism, you should:
- Rev up the chainsaw
- Fire up the wood chipper
- Unleash the hounds
- It’s also a good idea to lay in a stock of curare and darts
- You should wear splash-proof clothing
Alert editors keep an eye open for such mishaps, and make sure that the format of the final items matches the first, starting with a verb:
- Lay in a stock of curare and darts
- Wear splash-proof clothing.
WHEN REFERRING TO age, don’t ever say “years of age.” It’s both clunky and unnecessary – what else could years possibly be a measure of, if not age? And when you talk about age groups, remember to hyphenate:
Nearly all ten-to-fourteen-year-old boys hate being seen in public with their mothers
The principle holds for both words and figures:
The mortality rate was highest in the 60-to-80-year-old range
Note that both letters and figures should be snugged up tight around the hyphens (which, technically, should be en-dashes – a subject I'll address elsewhere).
PLEASE REMEMBER THAT “momentarily” properly means FOR a moment – and not, as is commonly assumed, IN a moment. If somebody tells you, “I’ll be back momentarily,” what he probably means to say is that he'll be back in a jiffy. But what the words actually indicate is that he's just popping back for a moment before dashing off again. (However, this may turn out to be one of those battles that word-use mavens may have to resign themselves to losing.)
STANDARD NEWSPAPER STYLE in this country is to spell out numbers from one to nine, and to use numerals for figures ten and up. Sadly, this kind of hard-and-fast rule can produce some stylistically irritating sentences, in which the most notable feature is the hand of a copyeditor unthinkingly applying a rigid rule. Personally, I find it annoying to read things like:
Usage leaped from eight per cent to 15 per cent over the past year
Attendance dropped from 52 people to nine people in a week
I believe that artificial rules should always yield to the demands of style; so my preferred strategy is to always make the second usage match the first.
WHY AN ENTERTAINER would deliberately want to belittle herself is beyond
me; but if someone like Lil’ Kim is absolutely set on it, I wish she’d
at least get the punctuation right. The apostrophe, as
always, takes the place of the missing letters – so the correct format
is Li’l Kim.
(Technically speaking, of course, the name ought to be Li’l’ Kim, with the first apostrophe substituting for the two t’s and the second for the final e. But even editors recognize when enough is enough.)
“A” VERSUS “AN”: this controversy is really a no-brainer. The rule is very simple: if you pronounce the letter H at the beginning of the word,, then the indefinite article is a: “a hat.” But if you don’t pronounce the H, then it’s an: “an hour.”
There are, in fact, only four words (count ‘em) in the English language today that don’t sound the initial aspirant. Check out my Personal Mnemonic Sentence™:
An heir is an honest and an honourable man, and he’ll be back in an hour.
That’s is. Case closed. Don’t listen to anybody who tries to tell you it’s “an historical moment” or any such nonsense. We don’t say, “He went down in ‘istory,” do we – unless we’re channelling Dickens and his comic Cockney characters? And any talk of “ ‘erbal tea” really grates on my British ears.
NOW THAT PAYING by debit card is the norm, and signs announcing the capability are on every bank machine and cash register, let's all get this one vital word correct: it’s “Interac.” Notice, there’s no T at the end. Yes, the handy piece of plastic does allow you to interact with commercial establishments everywhere; and yes, perhaps the banks should have given the system that name (rather than just focusing on its ability to allow inter-bank access). But they didn’t, so let’s live with it – and pronounce it properly.
REDUNDANT WORDS: WE don’t really need “or not” after “whether.” “Whether” is a conditional term; the fact that things could go either way is already implicit in it:
I wonder whether or not it’ll rain? =
I wonder whether it’ll rain?
Other such redundancies are “continue on,” “years of age,” “a long period of time,” “repeat again,” “short in length,” “invited guests,” “joined together,” “combine into one,” “commute back and forth,” “basic fundamentals,” “still remains,” “plan in advance,” and “personal opinion” (opinions are always personal, by definition).
Now that I’ve tried to set you straight on all these points, are there any pet peeves you’d like to share with me? If so, drop me a line and tell me – perhaps this page will include your contribution in future!
Stay tuned,
Antonia Morton.
