How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem (9 page)

Listing the eggcorns and all the other spelling mistakes is well and good, but the trouble is, if you’re about to commit one, by definition, you don’t know you’re doing so. That’s the blind spot again. The answer, again, is to cultivate an attitude of deep skepticism about your own word use. Then, if you have any smidgen of doubt about a word, DO NOT RELY ON SPELL-CHECK. Use a dictionary, preferably a paper one, and look up not only the spelling but the definition.

d. Skunked Words

I’m taking a wild guess that when some readers came to the second-to-last paragraph (the one that starts “Some eggcorns…”),
their reaction to at least one or two of the examples was “But, that’s right!”

To understand why they’re not, it’s helpful to think about “skunked terms,” a phrase coined by Bryan Garner, in his excellent book
Garner’s Modern American Usage.
(No comma after
book
because Garner is the author of several outstanding tomes.) Garner explained: “When a word undergoes a marked change from one use to another—a phase that might take ten years or a hundred—it’s likely to be the subject of dispute.” Even as the new meaning gains popularity, traditionalists—or, as they’re sometimes called, “prescriptivists”—dig in their heels and roundly condemn it as ignorant, illiterate, unacceptable, etc.

Garner observes—and I agree—“To the writer or speaker to whom credibility is important, it’s a good idea to avoid distracting
any
readers,” and thus he counsels avoiding these words and phrases. I agree with that, too.

The trouble is, like the language itself, the corpus of skunked words is always changing. To take just a few examples, I can remember when prescriptivists and sticklers used to grumble about the use of
contact
as a verb, as in
When are you going to contact the senator?
Hard to believe, but it’s true. Obviously, they lost that battle a long time ago. Even longer ago, the expressions
champing at the bit, stamping grounds, tit-bit,
and
pom-pon
roamed the earth. Eventually (more specifically, by the end of the nineteenth century), they turned into
chomping, stomping, tidbit,
and
pom-pom.
If you used the older forms today, you would get some seriously strange looks.

Again, I’ll note that writing and speaking have different standards. In conversation, getting your meaning across is really the
important thing, while writing for publication or in a business, journalistic, or academic setting demands a higher standard of rules and propriety. Thus new words and new meanings gain acceptance in conversation years or even decades before they do in writing.

Going back to the list of common eggcorns, let’s take a look at
duct tape,
a roll or two of which you can probably find less than fifty feet from where you’re sitting. It’s called
duct tape
because its original use was to tape up ducts, but
duct
is hard to say, so people started calling it “duck tape,” and then people started
writing “
duck tape.” You can even buy a brand of duct tape called Duck Tape. There’s a fun Web site called Google Fight (
http://googlefight.com
) that allows you to type in a pair of words or phrases and see how many times each of them has been used on the Internet. I just staged a fight between
duck tape
and
duct tape. Duct tape
won, but by a relatively slim margin of 1.83 million to 1.07 million. Before too long,
duck tape
will prevail, and
duct tape
will seem as antique and dusty as
an e-mail message.
But that day is not here yet, and using
duck tape
will still make you seem a bad writer, to at least some of your readers.

A list of current skunkers is below. Once again, some may
seem
perfectly fine, but all have traditional meanings different and in some cases opposite from the ones in popular use. (If you don’t believe me, look them up.) Going beyond the list, the best general way to avoid these guys is to read good writers in books and respectable publications, and follow their lead. As for an individual word, if you have any doubt as to its meaning, look it up in the dictionary. Either the skunked meaning won’t be there, or it will be the fourth or fifth definition, followed by a note that says something like
nonstandard
or
objected to by some.
And Google Fight is useful as well. If a onetime skunked term wins by a standard of at least two-thirds, I hereby declare it sanitized and ready to use.

The word in the left-hand column is the current skunked term; acceptable alternative(s) follow. When the skunked term has a different meaning, it’s given in parentheses.

alumni
alumni
is correct for plural, but for singular use
alumna
(female) or
alumnus
(male).
alot
a lot
alright
all right (However, similar words such as
already
and
awhile
can can be okay if used carefully.)
bemused
amused (
Bemused
= distracted or bothered.)
cliché
(
as adjective, as in
That’s so cliché
); clichéd.
comprised of
composed of; made up of
couple
(as in
couple things
)
couple of
disinterested
uninterested (
Disinterested =
impartial.)
fortuitous
lucky coincidence; felicitous (
Fortuitous =
accidental; unplanned.)
fun
(as adjective, as in
the funnest vacation ever
)
most enjoyable, or rewrite sentence.
genius
(as adjective, as in
a genius idea
)
inspired; brilliant; ingenious
grow
(transitive verb, as in
grow the business
)
develop; build up
less; fewer
Less
is used with a general, uncountable entity, as in
less water
or
less energy,
or as a general proposition:
He wanted more, but I wanted less. Fewer
is used with what can be counted:
fewer cars.
Less money means fewer dollars.
*
hopefully
I hope that
impact
(as verb)
affect; have an impact on
myself
(as subject, as in
Jesse and myself spent the whole day in the library
)
I
nonplussed
unfazed; nonchalant (
Nonplussed
= taken aback.)
novel
book (
Novel
= book-length work of fiction, as opposed to drama, poetry, or nonfiction.)
notorious, infamous
famous (
Notorious, infamous
= famous for something bad.)
penultimate
ultimate (
Penultimate
= second to last.)
phenomena
(as singular)
phenomenon
presently
currently; now (
Presently
= shortly; soon.)
verbal
oral; spoken (
Verbal
= in or having to do with words.)

One short skunked word and its relatives demand a fuller explanation. The word is
they
when used as an “epicene pronoun” (EP), that is, in place of a singular antecedent. For example:

1. [
Any student who wants to attend the game should bring their ID card to the ticket window.
]

2.
[
Arcade Fire and about 20,000 of their fans turned the PNC Center into a raucous party Thursday night.
]

3.
[
The Court Street Pub is changing to their summer menu this week.
]

The EP has a lot of arguments in its favor. In example 1, replacing
their
with
his
would sound sexist;
her
sounds like you’re trying
too hard
not
to be sexist; and
his or her
could come off as stilted. Meanwhile, using
it
for a rock band just sounds weird. Consequently, the EP—and all three of the above examples—are perfectly fine in conversation. I predict that they’ll be acceptable in formal writing in ten years, fifteen at the maximum. However, they’re not acceptable now, so you have to make adjustments.

1. Any student who wants to attend the game should bring his or her ID card to the ticket window.

A write-around is even better:

If you want to attend the game, you have to bring your ID card to the ticket window.

2. Arcade Fire and about 20,000 fans turned the PNC Center into a raucous party Thursday night.

3. The Court Street Pub is changing to its summer menu this week.

(For Skunked Grammar, see
II.C.2.d.
)

3.
WRONG WORD

The spell-check errors and the eggcorns get the headlines and the laughs, but a more common and insidious problem is word choices that are off, sometimes by just a hair, sometimes by a Howard Stern wig and a full beard. Too often, reading student papers is like listening
to a routine by Norm Crosby, the malapropeptic comedian who referred to having a good “rappaport” with a like-minded friend. Here are some real-life examples, with what I guess to be the right word in parenthesis:

On the Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers
exemplifies
(consists of
—but even better would be
is) a collection of essays, poems, and short stories by Delaware’s own authors.

Of the many things the students
aspired
(expected) to see, a terrorist attack was not one of them.

…the drop in candidates can be
accredited
(attributed) to

Stories about the hurricane
invade
(dominate) the entire first section of the newspaper.

No one can
blame
(accuse) John Henrickson of being an apathetic college student.

The vast
proportion
(majority) of students is enrolled in the College of Arts and Science.

She said it was her father’s participation in the army which
possessed
(inspired, motivated) her to join the College Republicans.

Then there’s this one, which seems to encapsulate all the problems students are having:

The land, which is currently occupied
with
(by) older, run-down homes, will be rejuvenated
(I’m not sure what the right word is—I just know that rejuvenated isn’t it)
to fit the positive
stigma
(image) that the city
manager
(is trying) to uphold.

How to fix or avoid the problem? Again, it’s a toughie. There’s not much more you can do than undertake a close scrutiny of your writing, dictionary in hand. Be very wary of the online thesaurus. If you are having problems with word choice, you also might do well to find a smart, well-read friend and agree to read each other’s work.

One common wrong-word subcategory happens when writers have a decent idea in mind and start it off well, but aren’t rigorous about matching up their subjects and verbs. Consider:

[
Investigations at that time did not uncover the source of the outbreak, and the number of infections soon ceased.
]

Well, infections may have ceased, but
numbers
don’t cease. The fix is simple:

Investigations at that time did not uncover the source of the outbreak, and infections soon ceased.

Similarly, in

[
In the past two years the national unemployment rate has doubled and is at a high that falls second to only one other peak in history, occurring in the 1980s.
]

the word
fall
doesn’t really belong and got the writer in trouble. Various adjustments could be made to spruce the sentence up, but at the very least you can say:

In the past two years, the national unemployment rate has doubled; it’s now at a high that is second to only one other peak in history, occurring in the 1980s.

D. Grammar

As I suggested in the introduction, grammatical mistakes are overrated—by which I mean they get a disproportionate amount of attention as a source of bad writing. By definition, native speakers of a language know its grammar. No American above the age of four would say, “Him gave the book to I.” However, we might say, “Peter and him went to the movie with Sarah and I,” which is nonstandard, or, to put it bluntly, wrong.

That, like virtually every other common grammatical “mistake,” is an instance of vernacular or colloquial expressions clashing with the standards of formal or public writing and usage. The mistakes fall into three categories:
Sanitized, Skunked
, and
Still Wrong
.

1.
SANITIZED

This refers to usages that at one time were verboten but, over the decades and sometimes centuries, have become acceptable to everybody, or just about everybody. In fact, in most of these cases, the formerly “correct” usage now sounds either too formal or just plain weird. However, you may have a supervisor, editor, or teacher who sticks to the old-fashioned dicta. If so, he or she, unfortunately, is the boss and nothing I say or write can change that. Still, you have my permission to wave this section in the air and protest that you read in a book that it’s perfectly acceptable to:

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