The Grammar Guru Speaks

In dialogue, common usage (as distinct from actual bad grammar) is fine. But in narrative, it doesn’t matter whether “everyone says that”, if it’s wrong, authors shouldn’t be using it. The author needs to obey the rules of grammar.

“To boldly go” may be a catchy line in a movie, but split infinitives are incorrect.

Never say “different than”. It’s “different from”.

If you have two daughters you have an older daughter and a younger daughter. You don’t have an oldest (or eldest) daughter until there are three or more of them.

Fewer is if you can count them. Otherwise use less. Fewer chocolates in the box, but less coffee in the pot.

There is no such thing as a half a sudden, so you can’t have “all of a sudden”. The word is “suddenly”.

Facebook may say “invite” as a noun but in real life it’s a verb. The noun is invitation.

Outside of/inside of “She licked the inside of her lips” is correct. But she didn’t go “inside of” the house. She simply went “inside the house”.

Subject and verb must agree. A group noun takes a singular verb. “The flock of sheep is grazing”, “the crowd was waiting”.

These are rules. Don’t yell at me if you don’t like them. Look them up yourself in the Chicago Manual of Style: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html then obey them.


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com
Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Oops: Just Made a Six-Figure Mistake

Well-known publishers Time Inc. had the clever idea of creating a new site to attract young women. As such companies do, they spent a lot of money and effort selecting and planning the stories they would publish, setting up the website and so on.

Then they spent a six-figure sum buying a full-age advertisement for their new site in the Wall Street Journal.

This is the ad they published. It appears they forgot to hire a copy editor to check it before it went to press.
Oops.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Misspelled and Misused words

In his latest book, The Sense of Style, Harvard cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker explores the most common words and phrases that people stumble over.
It is reminiscent of Strunk and White's classic The Elements of Style, but is based on linguistics and updated for the 21st century.
Pinker has identified the 51 most commonly misused words and phrases from his book and among them are Adverse, Depreciate, Flaunt (a lot of authors get this one wrong), Literally, and Staunch.

For the entire story go here: http://www.theage.com.au/world/our-51-most-commonly-misused-words-and-phrases-20151202-gldkqf.html

To test yourself on commonly misspelled and misused words try these two games:
http://bitecharge.com/play/grammartricky/h3
http://bitechargemedia.com/play/misspelled/h7

I got them all right. How about you?

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

The top 20 misspelled words quiz

It's time to test yourself? How well did you do?

PS. Yes, I got them all correct.


http://bitecharge.com/play/top20/h5


Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

The $19billion typo

An American nuclear waste facility, the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, New Mexico, took 20 years and $19 billion to build and a simple typo has shut it down. A radioactive drum burst open on Valentine’s Day last year. Drums of radioactive material were trucked in from around the US, where they were placed in salt caverns that would eventually be collapsed, burying the waste.

But investigations have shown that instead of INorganic (clay) kitty litter being added to the contents of the drums to stabilize it, a revised policy manual in 2012 instructed workers at the laboratory to use organic kitty litter to soak up excess liquid in drums of nitrate salts.

Which in turn led to the inevitable kaboom. A site that was supposed to last for 10,000 years is now being closed after just fifteen years.

It really would have been much cheaper to get their manual edited and proofread professionally by a couple of grammar Nazis.

The full story is here: http://www.news.com.au/technology/science/eric-schlosser-exposes-our-nuclear-delusions-at-festival-of-dangerous-ideas/story-fn5fsgyc-1227478302666


*Bonus points to anyone who noticed the typo in the picture.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Q without U

Almost all Australians recognize the word, Qantas, one of very few words in the English language where it’s correct to have a Q without a following U. It’s the third oldest airline in the world founded in November 1920 as Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services, but The Flying Kangaroo, has been known as Qantas for a long time now.

13 April was National Scrabble Day, and in honor of all those people who have thrown their tiles across the room when they drew a Q and no U, Plugged In has provided a list of nine genuine scrabble approved words with a Q and no U. They even give you their scrabble scores!

Qi, Qat, Faqir, Qwerty, Qaid, Qadi, Sheqel, Qindar, and Qoph.

And here I’d always thought sheqel was spelled shekel. Sigh.

For their meanings, scrabble scores and more details see: https://au.games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/9-perfectly-legal--scrabble--words-that-use-q-but-not-u-195802589.html

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

How well do you know your plurals?

Okay, here’s a quiz on tricky plurals for you to do. I got one hundred percent. It’s just as well because if I hadn’t I might have been sacked by my authors!
See how you go.
http://www.quizfreak.com/can-you-identify-the-plural-of-these-14-tough-words/

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Good Grammar = Higher Salary

Do you know what these words mean?

Here are some words from everyday speech that are often used incorrectly.

Literally: means something that really happened.

Regularly: something that happens at fixed pre-planned intervals

Factoid: A fun fact that is wrong

Invariably: Something that never changes

Enormity: The extreme scale of something that is bad or wrong.

Refute: To prove something is wrong

Now here are some others that the author might have meant to use correctly but that spellcheck won’t find for you:

Reign/rein
Founder/flounder
Palate/palette
Form/from
Than/then
Casually/causally
Loose/lose
Definitely/defiantly
Juncture/junction

If you need a dictionary to understand what I’m saying, there’s a good one at: www.onelook.com

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

World Dictionary Day

October 16 was World Dictionary Day, and in honor of that momentous occasion “The Huffington Post” published an article about Noah Webster, who they described as “the foremost lexicographer of American English”.

His “American Dictionary” published in 1828 took him twenty-eight years to complete. In preparation he learned twenty-six languages, including Old English, Ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. The final draft listed and defined seventy thousand words, more than any other dictionary in history. One in every six of Webster's words had never been listed in a dictionary before. He included a whole new vocabulary of emerging Americanisms like squash, skunk, hickory, chowder and applesauce for the very first time. And he took the opportunity to push through his ideas on English spelling reform - some of which took (center, color, honor, ax), and some of which didn't (dawter, wimmen, cloke, tung).

The article lists twenty-six of his more interesting inclusions, one for each letter of the alphabet.

This fascinating story includes daggle-tail, nuncupatory, tardigradous, and rakeshame which I actually recognized from reading Georgette Heyer books.

Okay, click on the link. You know you want to read the rest of these words.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-anthony-jones/forgotten-words_b_5985494.html?ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000043&ir=Science

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Spelling bloopers

For those of you who think spelling doesn’t really matter, everyone makes errors, no one cares, to some extent you’re right. Plenty of people don’t care, or maybe they don’t know what you wrote is wrong. But there are still others willing to post your errors over the internet. Which will give those of us who can spell a laugh.

WARNING: Swearing and bad language as well as typos and idiocy.

For example:

http://www.thepoke.co.uk/2014/05/21/the-25-worst-best-spelling-mistakes-on-twitter/

http://www.buzzfeed.com/alanwhite/19-people-who-took-on-the-english-language-and-lost?bffb

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Pronouncing words

If you can’t pronounce it correctly, you probably won’t spell it correctly either.

Remember Sarah Palin’s “refudiate”? But there are a lot of words people commonly mispronounce, and if they’re spoken incorrectly, most likely they’ll be spelled wrongly as well.
How many people do you know who say “aks” instead of ask, eckspresso instead of espresso, and eckcetra instead of etcetera?

Here are some other commonly mispronounced words:
Affidavid instead of affidavit
Cannidate instead of candidate
Irregardless instead of regardless.
Libel when you mean liable.
Miniture instead of miniature
Perogative instead of prerogative
Revelant instead of relevant
Triathalon instead of triathlon (many people add an extra “a”)
Upmost instead of utmost
Pronunciation is often mispronounced as “pronounciation”.
Hyperbowl” rather than Hyperbole
And for Melbournians Essadon instead of Essendon for the suburb and football team.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Does this need a hyphen?

Whether something is one word, two words, or hyphenated, often drives writers crazy. Is it goodbye or good-bye? Fairy tale? Fairytale? Or fairy-tale?

A quick way to check is to go to onelook.com.

It has 18 hits for good-bye and 23 for goodbye. A good rule of thumb is to go with the majority, so in this case, that’s goodbye. However, Merriam Webster is one of the 18 for good-bye and since many companies use Merriam Webster as their dictionary of choice, here, good-bye is an equally good pick.

Fairy tale is even worse. There are 11 hits on fairy tale, 8 on fairy-tale, and 17 on fairytale. And in this case Merriam Webster has it hyphenated, so any of the three is a reasonable choice.

My advice would be 1. Stick with the majority. Or 2. Stick with Merriam Webster. That is, unless you are targeting your book for a certain publisher. In that case always follow their style guide.

Do I hear you asking, “What about compound adjectives? Why is it a red-hot fire, but a brightly lit room?”
Now that one is easy. Words ending in ly are (usually) adverbs. By definition an adverb can never be a compound adjective.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Time to Laugh

Grammar Errors Bosses Hate

I was fascinated to see an article in the news entitled, “Grammar mistakes that could cost you the job”. Some days I think it’s only editors and English teachers who care about grammar, but apparently not.
Top of their hate list was spelling the company name incorrectly. (Well duh!) But also considered unforgiveable was using “irregardless” (this is not a word. It’s “regardless”), could of or should of (it’s “have” not “of”), and mixing up a whole long list of homonyms - words that sound alike but have different meanings. (Spell check can’t help you here. Look them up in onelook.com or any other dictionary).
Next on their list was getting wrong things like I versus me, your/you’re, adverbs and adjectives, it’s/its, than/then, and finally things like split infinitives.
If you’re planning to apply for a new job, or a job promotion, better brush up on your grammar first. It really does matter.
This is the article in full:
http://au.pfinance.yahoo.com/money-manager/career/article/-/18427804/grammar-mistakes-that-could-cost-you-the-job/

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Twenty-two fascinating fact about the English Language

How many of these did you already know??

1. The most commonly used letter is E.
2. The least used letter is Q.
3. Skiing is the only word with double i.
4. Dreamt is the only word that ends in 'mt.'
5. There are only 4 words which end in 'dous': hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.
6. 'Bookkeeper' and 'bookkeeping' are the only 2 words with three consecutive double letters.
7. The word 'strengths' is the longest word with just one vowel.
8. The word 'testify' derived from a time when men were required to swear on their testicles. (fr. Latin, 'testis').
9. All pilots on international flights identify themselves in English regardless of their country of origin.
10. The word 'almost' is the longest with all the letters in alphabetical order.
11. The most commonly used word in conversation is 'I'.
12. Defenselessness and Respectlessness are both fifteen-letter words with only one of the vowels.
13. RHYTHMS is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, u.
14. Excluding derivatives there are only two words in English that end with -shion. They are CUSHION and FASHION.
15. 12 words can be formed from the word “THEREIN” using consecutive letters: The, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, and herein.
16. There is only one common word in English that has 5 vowels in a row – QUEUEING.
17. “One thousand” contains the letter ‘A’. None of the words from one to nine hundred and ninety nine has an A.
18. Two words having all the vowels in the reverse order are SUBCONTINENTAL and UNCOMPLIMENTARY.
19. These are the only six-letter words that begin and end with same vowel and there is no other vowel in between: Asthma and Isthmi.
20. The longest English word is a 45-letter word which is the name of a disease: “pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.”
21. A superlatively long word of 27 letters having 13 vowels which alternates consonants and vowels: HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS. Some more examples are Antidisestablishmentarianism and Electrophotomicrographically.
22. UNDERGROUND and UNDERFUND are the only words in English that begin and end with the letters “und”.

Helen Woodall
helen.woodall@gmail.com

Helen is available to line edit and/ or content edit fiction and non-fiction. Rates on application.

Everyone needs a good editor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spelling Explained

If English spelling obays its major rules, then almost every spelling pattern* has no mor than two possibl pronunciations and almost every sound no mor than two possibl spelling patterns.

Then the task of literacy is dramaticly less.

Dictionaries would include spellings that aplied these rules among thair thousands of alredy permitted alturnativ spellings for wurds. The French ar alredy duing this for 6000 French wurds.

Pronunciation kees in dictionaries would use the basic sound-spelling relationships that beginners would lern in lerning to read.

Children’s introduction to education would include thinking in lerning to read, not unexplaind rote lerning of what seems silly to them. Spellers could reason out how to spell, and be permitted to use eny of the rule-based patterns to spell a wurd ‘correctly’.

There would still be a standard spelling for fast composition and fast reading, but it would include a narro range of alturnativs. Since it was so easy to lern and use, it would hold the international spoken English language mor closely together and mor mutually comprehensibl than is happening at present, when so meny English-users remain illiterat or almost so.

Lerners would hav very few choices to make in decoding. Visual familliarity would consolidate these choices in the spelling of words, unlike the present plethora of unpredictabls.

Spellcheckers can allow the alternativ choices in spelling, since thay ar so few.

* Spelling pattern - a relationship of letters to sounds. This can vairy acording to place in a wurd and gramattical function of the wurd.

For the full spelling rules check out: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~ozideas/sprules1p.htm

Helen Woodall

helen.woodall@gmail.com