140 Writing Mistakes You Should Never Make

By William Murdick Ph.D.

How to spot and correct mistakes in your writing, especially those that would embarrass you or undermine your efforts at work.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543995886

Book preview

ISBN-978-1-5439958-8-6

Chapters

1 The Golden Rule

2 Form and Format

3 Spelling

4 Rhetoric

5 Writing about Science

6 Style

7 Grammar

8 Voice and Mood

9 Word Meaning and Usage

10 Punctuation

11 The Worst Writing Mistake You Can Make

1

The Golden Rule

Writing in the professional workplace is generally a practical activity. The idea is to get reports or proposals or instructions or personal messages to people who need them to carry on their work. However, professional texts also carry social messages. A colleague at work who sends sloppily handwritten notes that are hard to read infuriates everyone contacted, as does a teacher who marks up student essays with undecipherable comments.

Certain kinds of spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors create another type of bad impression. You can come across as uneducated or lowbrow, even if holding a college degree. An ad writer for a clothing company who misspells fashion designer Thom Browne’s name leaves potential customers wondering about the quality of that company’s products. Some rhetorical mistakes, such as the wrong content in a trip report, can undermine one’s chances for promotion. Leaving out a warning about the potential danger of a product as mundane as a hot cup of coffee can result in a company being sued for millions (which happened here in the U.S.).

Small writing errors often escape notice. Except for English teachers in composition classes, your bosses and your colleagues in the workplace typically read for meaning, not to critique sentences. And you would think that the corporate environment—if that’s where you work or that’s where you’re headed after college--might be a place where small mistakes would not register, but no. Dr. Richard Ray, a technical writing textbook author, once interviewed an experienced technical writer as background for a handout for his graduate students. Here’s what the technical writer said on the subject of error:

Every corporation of any size has a number of people in supervisory positions who are fussier than a traditionally trained English professor about little items of grammar and usage.

Of the thousands of possible mistakes you might make as a writer, this book focuses on those I have encountered in the professional workplace. In many instances, you can avoid errors by just being aware of them. For more difficult cases, I offer in-depth explanations and strategies for staying out of trouble.

In addition to this book, as well as some usage guides I recommend in Chapter 9, you might try out a grammar checker app. These will provide a pop up window when they spot a possible grammatical or usage error in your text as you write. That can get irritating, but if you are willing to put up with a continual intrusion on your thoughts, they may be helpful. Search the Web for 5 Best Grammar Checkers.

When I present an example of a sentence-level writing mistake of any kind in this eBook, I will follow the convention of putting an asterisk (*) in front of it, as linguists do when presenting a sentence that isn’t permissible in the grammar of the language under discussion. For example:

* What better way to get the last laugh than make George and I say nice things about him before a national audience. --Barack Obama

* Nobody knows more about walls than me. --Donald Trump

One final point before we begin. The purpose of this book is to help you avoid mistakes harmful to you. It will undoubtedly also help you spot mistakes in other people's writing. When that occurs, what should you do?

Well, the revered principle of moral reciprocity—aka the Golden Rule—which dates back in Western writings to as early as the 6th c. B.C., dictates that you should do unto others as you would have others do unto you. In other words, quietly point out the error to the writer, but otherwise keep it to yourself. Don’t laughingly pass it on to everyone in sight. This way you not only earn your colleague's gratitude, you may also influence how that person, in the future, will react to the mistakes of others.

A final point on this matter: In this book, the above application of the Golden Rule does not apply to professional writers, politicians, and celebrities, whose mistakes I use as examples. Professional writers, when they see their mistakes, get better at not making them. Politicians and celebrities are well served by any act that deflates their ego.

2

Form and Format

#1 Sloppy Handwriting

Although we live in a world in which almost all text is computer generated, there are occasions when a quick handwritten note or memo is more convenient than firing up a word processing program and then typing and printing a short message. Just make sure that the recipient can read every word of the text.

I have very bad handwriting, but when I was in junior high, I hung out for awhile with a boy who was super neat about everything, including his handwriting. He actually printed, instead of using a cursive script. I took his idea and adopted a style which combined printing and some cursive moves for speed. A word like write in my handwriting looks like this: wr ite. Note how the printing gives way to cursive script in the last three letters. It took me no time at all to develop the ability to write like this very quickly and legibly. If your handwriting is a mess, try printing, or develop a hybrid style like mine, or work on a readable cursive style.

Imagine some new fellow in your organization has just written and sent up the ladder a short internal report, and you send it back down to him with some illegible notes scribbled in the margins, your suggestions for improvements. How do you suppose he’s going to feel about that?

Inducing stress in your underlings by making your necessary changes incomprehensible is just plain incompetent.

#2 Illegible Signature

Most of the time when you sign a text in the professional workplace, your name also appears in a typed form, so you can get away with an illegible signature. However, a signature that stands out for its excessively fancy or sloppy form draws attention to itself. Presumably you want your reader thinking about your message, not trying to decipher clues to your personality. So that attention is a distraction. And there will come times when you sign something and your signature will be the only presentation of your name, so you need to be able to sign your name in a way that all letters are discernable. Start practicing, and have fun with it.

One warning, though. Make sure you register any new signature with your bank. Otherwise your checks may start to bounce, as happened to me once when I changed my signature.

3# A Sloppy Text

All business or professional documents (not just resumes) should be perfect in appearance. No ink smudges. No wrinkles in the paper. No misaligned lists or varying paragraph indentations. Check for faults like that before you submit the text. (Alas, at this time, conversions of texts to e-book format can sometime result in misaligned text which cannot be repaired.)

E-mails within the world of professional work should have the same neat appearance as a memo or letter printed on paper. Take the trouble.

#4 Proofreading Errors

We make two kinds of mistakes in our speech and writing: competence errors and performance errors. Almost all the mistakes discussed in this book are competence errors; they arise out of ignorance of some principle or standard. Proofreading errors, however, fall into the latter category of performance errors. They are the routine slip ups that occur in our writing, such as typing teh when you meant the or writing there for their when you know the difference.

Many proofreading errors do not interfere with one’s understanding of the sentence, but they are still disturbing. Readers may be awoken from their dream of concentration. Their reading disrupted, a frown forming on the brow, their attitude toward the writer could easily change in an unhappy direction. Here are some examples (my underlining):

*To be clear, the congressmen is from Tennessee.

–Gail Collins, NYTimes columnist

*And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented, aside from … the United States, for 35 years after World War II — including the most successful period of economic growth in our history.

--Paul Krugman, Nobel prize winner in economics

*Where to begin with Trump’s rambling news conference to announced he was invoking a national emergency to build a border wall?

--Fact checkers for the Washington Post

But often a proofreading error can make prose difficult to understand. Imagine reading pages of text that read like this sentence:

*Leisha Pickering claims that Chip Pickering adultery is the biggest cause of their problems and that is has been ruining their marriage.

I won’t tell you where that sentence comes from, but pity the poor Pickerings and the poor reader. Let’s fix the proofreading errors:

Leisha Pickering claims that Chip Pickering’s adultery is the biggest cause of their problems and that it has been ruining their marriage.

It took only two small errors to make that sentence easy to stumble over on the first reading: a missing morpheme (‘s) and a word substitution (is for it).

Proofreading errors can make you look stupid, as in this case in which candidate Donald Trump, angry that the journalist Gail Collins had ridiculed him in a column in Newsday, sent her in the mail a copy of her column with his comments written all over it. One of those comments included an arrow pointing to a picture of her photo with this remark: The face of a pig — no wonder you are so angry. I would be to.

You have to wonder if the future President knew that he should have written too.

Proofreading errors can come in the form of punctuation mistakes:

*Republicans retained the governorship and legislature but, under the new, law no 10-year map could be approved without a specified minimum of support from the minority party in the state government.

--The Washington Post

We never separate an adjective from the noun it modifies: …new, law….

Missing words are particularly confusing, as in this sentence:

*Ms. Sinema takes the seat being vacated by Jeff Flake, a Republican is leaving the Senate after repeated clashes with President Trump.

The word who is missing after Republican. And this one from the Washington Post (which helpfully provides so many good examples of all kinds for this book):

Hall said the country needs to take step back from a narrow conversation about the political and even criminal ramifications of each Mueller indictment.

–Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky

It should read take a step back. This mistake, which probably occurred when someone made an editing change, got by three authors and the newspaper’s editor and proofreader.

Who knows how many this error in Mitt Romney’s campaign slogan got by—

A Better Americia

Professional proofreaders are effective partly because they know what to look for (see the list below) and where to look. Errors occur to an uncanny degree in

•titles

•section headings

•the first lines of paragraphs

•the first element in a vertical list

•anywhere that the typeface suddenly changes, such as a change in font size or a shift from plain text to italics.

Do a conscious proofread of those places, as you review the whole text for errors like these:

Missing words

TEXT: I really think any coach give a player a hard time.

INTENDED: I really don’t think any coach should give a player a hard time.

Missing word parts

TEXT: When that employee see that both customer have. . . .

INTENDED: When that employee sees that both customers have. . . .

Word part substitutions

TEXT: He shouldn’t be knocked it.

INTENDED: He shouldn’t be knocking it.

A missing period, end parenthesis, or end quotation mark

Missing end quote:

TEXT: According to Anderson, "School grammar is hard to learn partly because English grammar is not nearly as simple or consistent as it is made out to be in textbooks. For example, pronouns, in reality, don’t always refer to something in the text.

INTENDED: According to Anderson, School grammar is hard to learn partly because English grammar is not nearly as simple or consistent as it is made out to be in textbooks. For example, pronouns, in reality, don’t always refer to something in the text.

Transposed letters

TEXT: teh

INTENDED: the

Transposed words

TEXT: how well I can the do work

INTENDED: how well I can do the work

Repeated Words

…and Cohen pleaded guilty pleaded guilty to campaign finance violations regarding these transactions.

Alternate correct spellings

Sometimes writing online and other times writing on-line

List format errors

Creating a vertical list in which the elements don’t line up; misnumbering items in a numbered list

Obvious capitalization errors

Such as failing to capitalize a person’s name: Jeff mcQuillan wrote. . . .

Widows and orphans

A section title at the bottom of the page; a last page consisting of only a single line

Reference errors

Referring to Figure 7 as Figure 6; referring the reader to page 2 for a passage that actually appears on page 1; failing to provide a bibliographic entry for a parenthetical note in the text

Bad math

Mistakes in arithmetic; breaking something down into percentages that don’t add up to 100.

#5 Creating a New Error

When proofreading or editing, every time you make a change in your text, read over the whole passage, focusing on the sentence in which the correction was made, to make sure you have not created a new error in the course of fixing the old one.

FIRST VERSION:

I notice that on Nextag.com, for example, that one can pay the full price of $27.25 for Hacker’s Handbook from one book seller or as little as $11.33 for a used copy from another vendor.

SECOND, EDITED VERSION:

*On NextagDOTcom, for example, at the time of this writing that one can pay the full price of $27.25 for Hacker’s Handbook from one book seller or as little as $11.33 for a used copy from another vendor.

In the revision, the phrase I notice that has been removed, and the second that no longer fits into the new grammatical structure. It should have been eliminated, too.

Beware of changes you make in complicated sentences, in which the phrasing of a later part depends on the phrasing of an earlier part. Changing either part without changing the other can result in your statement saying the opposite of what was intended. That’s what happened in the following prepared statement by Tomas Ojea Quintana, UN specialist on human rights in North Korea, commenting on an upcoming summit:

*Any accord that the parties could reach will remain fragile unless human rights issues are not discussed and unless there is a plan [for] how to address that situation in North Korea.

--USA Today

Quintana had edited his text so that it did not say what was intended, either unless human rights issues are discussed or if human rights issues are not discussed. Probably the if was replaced with unless during editing and the not was accidentally left in place.

Creating a new fault is a common occurrence, so be alert to it. Review your edits carefully, looking for new proofreading errors.

6# The Wrong Paper

Save colored paper and off-white paper for love notes and personal messages to friends. Use white for all business communications and student work that is turned in. Researchers in business and technical writing have been studying the issue of non-white paper for decades and have consistently come up with the same finding: Recipients want white.

In the professional workplace, use good stock paper, not the cheap laser paper, for important letters, resumes, and other short business documents going out to one or only a few recipients.

Use the laser paper for the body of long documents and for short ones going out to many people.

#7 No Date

Every professional communication is part of a formal record of relationships, intentions, and activities. As such, it should be dated. Get used to putting the date at the top of everything you write, even love letters. Well, maybe not love letters.

Students--date every