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.

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:

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.

A write-around is even better:

(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:

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

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:

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

Similarly, in

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: