140 Writing Mistakes You Should Never Make

By William Murdick

Designed for college students and employees in the professional workplace to help them avoid common writing mistakes that show up in essays and in business and technical texts. The mistakes range from small grammatical errors to huge rhetorical disasters.

As a college textbook, the content is applicable to courses in basic writing, composition I, composition II, advanced writing, business writing, and technical writing. The mistakes are numbered for convenient selection and assignment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098358303

Book preview

Purchase at: 140writingmistakes.com

Author’s credentials: Emeritus professor of English; Ph.D. in Rhetoric & Linguistics; 30 years experience teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in writing and the teaching of writing; 20 years experience as a freelance technical writer; author of textbooks in technical writing and business writing (Houghton Mifflin) and in composition (Jain Publishing). For additional details, go to 140writingmistakes.com

IMPORTANT!

This book is copyright protected. Do not reproduce except for your own use, and then only if you have purchased a copy.

ISBN: 978-1-0983583-0-3

Contents

Numbered List of Mistakes

Read This First

1 Form and Format

2 Spelling

3 Rhetoric

4 Writing about Science

5 Style

6 Grammar

7 Voice and Mood

8 Word Meaning and Usage

9 Punctuation

10 The Worst Writing Mistake You Can Make

Numbered List of Mistakes

Form & Format

#1- Sloppy Handwriting

#2- Illegible Signature

#3- A Sloppy Text

#4- Proofreading Errors

#5- Creating a New Error

#6- The Wrong Paper

#7- No Date

#8- Wrong Form or Content for Reports

#9- Failure to Think and Write Visually

Spelling

#10- Misspelled Name

#11- Inconsistent Spellings

#12- Capitalization Error in Personal Titles

Rhetoric

#13- Bad Title

#14- A Boring Beginning

#15- An Uninformative Beginning

#16- A Lack of Necessary Redundancy

#17- Using the Wrong Point of View in Persuasive Writing

#18- Failure to Account for Audience Traits

#19- Failure to Account for Multiple Audiences

#20- Failure to Reveal Organization

#21- False Analogy

#22- Ad Hominem Argument

#23- Exaggeration

#24- Hiding or Delaying Good News

#25- Hiding or Delaying Bad News

#26- Delaying or Omitting Information in Instructions

#27- Leaving Out Warnings in Instructions

#28- More Than One Action in a Step

#29- Leaving Out Useful Information on Your Organization’s Website

#30- Failure to Respect Intellectual Property Rights

#31- Failure to Provide Standard Content in a Routine Short Report

Writing About Science

#32- Inaccurate Arithmetic

#33- Misleading Statistical Data

#34- Using a Lay Definition in a Scientific Context

#35- Misuse of Prove

#36- Misuse of Theory

#37- Misuse of Hypothesis

#38- Mistaking Subjective Judgments for Objective Ones

#39- Improper Sampling

#40- Data as Singular

#41- Media as Singular

#42- Criteria as Singular

#43- Mistakes in Formatting Numbers

Style

#44- Personifying an Organization

#45- That in Reference to People

#46- Crude Substitutions for Because

#47- Double Negatives

#48- Excessive Modification

#49- Excessive Left-Branching

#50- Over-Embedding

#51- Dangling Modifier

#52- Misplaced Modifier

#53- The Obese Sentence

#54- The Chubby Sentence

#55- Unclear Agent

#56- Excessive Nominalization

#57- Long Noun and Adjective Strings

#58- Overuse of Intensifiers

#59- Inappropriate Absolutes

#60- Too Many Cliches

#61- Bad Metaphor

#62- Breakdown in Parallel Structure

#63- Failure to Emphasize Parallel Structure

#64- Failure to Define

#65- A Biased Perspective

#66- Not Calling People What They Want to Be Called

#67- Gender-Biased Language

#68- The Feminist Error

#69- Breaking the Rule of Courteous Order

Grammar

#70- Use of the Object Form in the Subject Position

#71- Error in the Use of the Reflexive Form

#72- Subject Pronoun after a Preposition

#73- Subject Pronoun after a Verb

#74- Subject Pronoun after a Verbal

#75- Object Pronoun at the end of a Comparison

#76- Possessive before a Gerund

#77- Who/Whom Confusion

#78- The Grammatical Structure Engineering Problem

#79- Breakdown in Subject-Verb Agreement

#80- Failure to Recognize False Compounds

#81- Breakdown in Pronoun /Antecedent Agreement

#82- Writing a Possessive as a Plural

#83- Distribution Confusion

#84- Failure to Complete a Comparison

Voice and Mood

#85- Overuse of the Passive Voice

#86- Unknown Decision Maker

#87- Use of the Deleted Agent to Deliberately Hide Responsibility

#88- Misuse of the Passive Voice for Instructions

#89- Dragging in an Irrelevant Agent

#90- Losing Focus with the Wrong Voice

#91- Failure to Use the Subjunctive with Contrary-to-Fact Statements

#92- Failure to Use the Subjunctive with commands and Requests

Word Meaning and Usage

#93- Misusing a Word You Have Just Learned

#94- Inappropriate Use of Local Dialect

#95- Mistakes with Foreign Words

#96- Adverb/Adjective Confusion after Linking and Action Verbs

#97- A/An Confusion

#98- Altogether for All Together

#99- Aggravate for Irritate

#100- Between for Among

#101- To for Too

#102—Awhile for A While

#103- Less for Fewer

#104- Amount for Number

#105- Best for Better

#106- Affect for Effect

#107- Lay for Lie

#108- Enormity for Enormousness

#109- Disinterested for Uninterested

#110- Alternate for Alternative

#111- Healthy for Healthful

#112- Notoriety for Fame

#113- Irregardless for Regardless

#114- Principle for Principal

#115- Continuous for Continual Proceed for Precede

#116- Peruse for skim

#117- Oral for Verbal

#118- Port for Starboard

#119- Libel for Slander

#120- Transgender for Transsexual

#121- Socialism to Describe Capitalist Economies

Punctuation

#122- Comma Error with a Transitional Conjunction

#123- Missing Comma after an Opening Structure

#124- Misplacing a Parenthetical Comma

#125- Comma Missing in Subordinate Compounds

#126- Faulty Comma Use for Restrictive and Non-Restrictive Modifiers

#127- Comma Splice

#128- Missing Serial Comma or Serial Semicolon

#129- Unwanted Comma Separating Subject and Predicate

#130- Unwanted Comma Coordinating Less than Independent Clauses

#131- Using British Punctuation with Quotation Marks

#132- Missing Apostrophe for a Missing Letter

#133- Missing Period with Ellipses

#134- Parentheses for Brackets

#135- Poorly Punctuated List

#136- Incorrect Hyphenation

The Worst Writing Mistake

#137- Failure to Show Gratitude

#138- Failure to Apologize

#139- Failure to Write Down Complicated Instructions

#140- Failure to Make Connections

Read This First

I have designed this e-book to be of use to both college students and employees in the professional workplace. The purpose is to help you avoid writing mistakes that will lower your grades or harm your career. It will not teach you how to write in a general sense, though some of the entries will point the way toward a more effective text.

I spent 30 years working as a university English professor and 20 years working on the side as a freelance technical writer. During that time, I noticed and recorded in a notebook many of the mistakes I encountered in the writing of both students and published authors, and this book is based on those notes.

As a college textbook, the content is applicable to a number of writing courses: Basic Writing, Composition I, Composition II, Advanced Writing, Business Writing, and Technical Writing. The mistakes are numbered for convenient selection and assignment.

Note: I will follow the tradition of linguistic texts and put an asterisk (*) at the front of any model sentence with an internal problem.

1

Form and Format Problems

#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 a while 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: write. 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.

Note to teachers: If you want your students to really dislike you, critique their papers in illegible marginalia. During my years as a college professor, one of my English department colleagues regularly scribbled unreadable comments in the margins of student papers. I know how angry and frustrated it made those students.

#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. 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 college papers submitted for a grade and 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.

College teachers have to read piles of papers, not just yours. They appreciate neatness. It’s easier on their weary eyes. A sloppy appearance in a text puts them in a bad mood. Grading is always somewhat subjective, so you want your instructor in a good mood when wondering what grade to give you.

E-mails are profuse within the world of professional work, and they are often dashed off. That is a mistake. E-mails at work should have the same neat appearance and clarity as a formal 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.

Some proofreading errors do not interfere with a reader’s understanding of the sentence. For example:

*To be clear, the congressmen is from Tennessee.

–Gail Collins, NYTimes columnist

*And it’s a policy nobody has every implemented….

--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

The only thing remarkable about such errors as the ones above is that they got by both the writers and the newspapers’ proofreaders in a short text. 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.

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 handwritten comments scrawled 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….

Who knows how many people 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 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….

Reference errors

Referring to Figure 2 as Figure 3; 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 not only on the sentence in which the correction was made, but the surrounding text as well, to make sure you have not created a new error in the course of fixing the old one. For instance, the new text may have a contradiction in it that wasn’t there before the editing correction.

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

#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,