How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (8 page)

One major consequence is a sharp increase in the number of bungled homophones—homophones being a pair of words that sound the same but mean different things. A lot of times the mistakes create unintentional humor, and make me want to concoct snarky,
New Yorker
–style headings, as in:

But a little of this comedy goes a long way, and in any case doesn’t win your writing a great deal of respect. Here are some of the most commonly confused words; study them:

b. The Blind Spot, Yet Again

In a particularly sloppy sort of spell-check error, the writer knows very well that he or she has typed the wrong word—or would know if he or she took even a couple of seconds to look over the sentence. The words have completely different meanings and don’t sound exactly or sometimes even vaguely alike:
thought
instead
of
though,
for example,
on
instead of
one,
or
weird
instead if
wired.
But the writer has come to rely on the squiggly red line, and the squiggly red line is no help. Some of these mistakes have become so common that I think the writers don’t actually realize they’re wrong. For example:

• Advise
  (verb) instead of
  advice
  (noun).
  
• Breathe
  (verb) instead of
  breath
  (noun).
  
• Loose
  (adjective) instead of
  lose
  (verb).
  
• Mixing up
  quiet
  and
  quite
  and
  than
  and
  then.
  
• Where
  instead of
  were.
  

And sometimes these substitutions can have a certain poetic rightness to them. The student who wrote, “The
eminent
[instead of
imminent
] arrival of spring marks a time for flip-flops, volleyball, and compost,” and the one who said, “People will say we are America and we can not let our
hollowed
[instead of
hallowed
] education system be mocked,” after the Virginia Tech shootings, made felicitous plays on words that may even have been intentional (probably not). Yet another student wrote, “In 1996, former President Bill Clinton singed the Defense of Marriage Act.” No comment.

Most of the time, however, the only redeeming social value these errors have is that they’re funny. You may be laughing to keep from howling with despair, but at least you’re laughing. I once got an assignment with the line “You can get a descent car for $2000,” which seems about right for a vehicle that can only go downhill. This nicely complemented another essay with the sentence “The narrative
voice was undeniably a black man in his late thirties or early forties, educated, and possibly of middle-class decent.”

And these guys can get the
New Yorker
–heading–treatment as well.

Try it yourself, it’s fun!

Truth to tell, I don’t always know if the people who make these mistakes are aware that they’re mistakes. I do know that relying on spell-check and your instincts creates a huge blind spot as far as spelling is concerned.

c.
Eggcorns

In 2003, linguist Geoffrey Pullum coined the term
eggcorn
to refer to common homophone or near-homophone mistakes in which the mistake makes a kind of sense.
Eggcorn
itself has a certain logic, for example, because acorns are roughly the shape of eggs. In writing and usage circles, the term caught on, and you can go to the Eggcorn Database (
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/
), where, as of this writing, 631 examples are collected and defined.

Spell-check has ushered in a golden age of eggcorns, and people can be quite creative and individualistic with them. In the Introduction, I mentioned the article I once got about a board-of-education meeting that mentioned the
Super Attendant of Schools
and the one on drug problems that referred to a
heroine attic.
Others have made reference to the environmental group
the National Autobahn Society
, to
Linda B. Johnson,
to
an ex–Green Barrette,
and to the punk rocker
Sid Viscous
. I always thought he was an oily guy.

Sometimes you have to think before you realize what was meant, as in references to a newspaper’s ethics policy being determined by its
On-Buzz Man
(the real word is
ombudsman
) and to the writer’s fondness for going out on the town wearing a
sequence-covered dress.
Only after searching for context clues and employing the process of elimination did I realize that that a
supped up hers
was supposed to be
souped-up hearse.

I once got an assignment that talked about a student athlete who had to miss several games because of
phenomena.
I stared at that one for a few minutes before realizing it was supposed to be, that’s right,
pneumonia.
The error illustrates another spell-check problem. What probably happened is that the student took a wild
stab at the spelling of the disease and then perused spell-check’s suggestions. Maybe the stab was so wild that the correct spelling wasn’t on the list; maybe it was and the student didn’t recognize it. Who knows. The end result, in any case, was
phenomena.

One hears a lot of these in conversation, most famously
for all
intensive
intents and purposes
and
Old Timer’s
Alzheimer’s disease.
Some of the others I’ve come upon and treasured include
It’s a
doggy-dog
dog-eat-dog world
and
Any notes, quotes, or
antidotes
anecdotes?

Some eggcorns come up so often that they now outnumber correct usages, at least in the work handed in to me. I actually expect to read that something
peaks
or
peeks
(rather than
piques
) the interest; that a person
poured
(rather than
pored
) over a book; or that a storm
wrecked
or
reeked
(as opposed to
wreaked
) havoc. Other popular ones are
hone in on
(as opposed to
home in on
);
dribble
(
drivel
); a
mute
(as opposed to
moot
)
point
; and
take the reigns
(
reins
).