Are You Making These Common Grammatical Mistakes?
No one can recognize our merciless abuse of the English language as well as an editor. Place the modifier incorrectly and your editor will (hopefully) let you know. Overuse amplifiers such as “very,” “simple,” and “really,” and your editor will tell you that you are really just not doing your writing favors. My editor at Lifehacker officially spared me the overuse of the word “often,” which she noted is not entirely wrong, but simply a longer way of saying “often.”
And now Laura Hellmuth , health and science editor for The Washington Post, is here to help us with the many other ways we mess up the English language.
She listed her personal favorite (least favorite?) Bugs on Twitter , and then her followers added even more gems. This is kind of a thread that I could read all day and I did it to share the best with you.
From Laura
- “Enormity” means something really bad, not something really big.
- “Men and women” in almost all circumstances should be “people.” There is already enough hypender in the world.
- Famous is a word you almost never need. If your reader knows a person or event, you don’t need to tell them that they are known. If your reader DOESN’T KNOW something, calling it famous can make your reader feel ignorant or unwelcome about your story. (One exception, as one follower pointed out, is to say that someone was “famous in their day,” if it is someone who is relatively unknown now but was once a big event.)
- It is spelled as “impostor,” not “impostor,” which I only found out after being quoted in a story about Impostor Syndrome.
- In some cases, you can use “caviar” metaphorically, but keep in mind that this literally means a fish or frog spewing eggs or sperm.
- Avoid the words “such and such” because you don’t know what they believe, you only know what they say.
From her followers
- Penultimate means “penultimate”, not “far beyond the final.”
- You should never put “fact that” in front of something.
- “To.” It’s just that the “k” does the same job.
- Using “I” when the object pronoun “I” should be used. For example, “He took Jean and me to the store.” How do you know what is right? Remove the other person from the proposal. “He took me to the store” doesn’t sound right.
- Named versus title. The document is titled XYZ. My dog was a good girl and was eligible for cookies.
- I try to exclude “really” from my vocabulary, mainly the speaker. Doesn’t add anything.
- “And the reason why …” is unnecessary. Just say, “The reason is …”
- Unique means one of a kind, it is absolute and has no degrees of uniqueness. The very unique, the more unique, the most unique, etc. are all pointless.
- Technically, this is not a mistake, but using an unreasonable “interesting” before presenting a point of view is annoying, especially if it is done multiple times in the same article.
- Another word that I use so often incorrectly is “discreet”. It is NOT synonymous with resisting. It means “silent” or “laconic”.
- I think that the word “different” is often unnecessary – 12 different people …
- Nondescript. Describe it, damn it.
Just for fun, I’m going to throw up my pet peeve – by using “more” or “less” (describes physical relationships in space) when you really mean “more than” or “less than” (amount). Are the tickets over $ 10? No, they cost over $ 10.
Of course, we have to be flexible to some extent; language develops over time. The purpose of language is to communicate, and if you can be understood informally – well, often that’s all you need.
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