In a previous post, Becoming Invisible I mentioned some errors that shock readers out of the spell you are casting with your fine writing. I’ve accumulated more for my list and here they are.
Gaffs to avoid
These are mistakes I have collected from writing I have read or edited (and some I’ve made myself).
- accept/except - She accepted (agreed to) the gifts, all except (excluding) the one from me.
- principle/principal – The principle (rule) of parsimony was the principal (first, primary) reason I kept the article short.
- discrete/discreet – The one means circumspect or prudent (discreet) and the other means separate from some group or category (discrete).
- belief/believe - My belief (noun) is that you believe (verb) things I do not.
- proceed/precede - To proceed is to continue or move on, precede means to go before in space or time, as an introduction might precede the main body of a book.
- illusion/allusion – She mentioned the magician’s illusion (a false impression of reality) when making an allusion (implication or passing indirect reference) to how fake my passion seemed.
- lay/lie - Lay is the action of placing something down (usually horizontally), while lie is the condition of being there. So, if I lay a book down on the table, it is lying there and it lies on the table.
- to/too – The second means extremely, very, or in addition to. I am too (very) short for dancing and I am roundish too (in addition).
- capital/capitol – Capitol is the building where the legislature meets, either in Washington D.C. or in a state. All the other meanings are capital.
- then/than – Then is used for time and than is used in comparisons: I had more sense then (time) than (comparison) I have now.
- accede/exceed – Accede means to agree to and exceed means to go beyond some measure or expectation.
- access/excess – I had access to the secret vault where I found an excess of top secret documents.
- all ready/ already – It’s already noon, are we all ready to go?
- all together/altogether – We were all together on the train, although it was altogether too crowded to breathe.
And now I need a breath.
The confusing pairs I’ve listed so far won’t get caught by your spell checker. Maybe that is why so many slip through. But there’s another type of mistake that doesn’t get caught; one that can be really embarrassing.
It happens when a word is misspelled, but ends up correctly spelling another word, one that wasn’t intended.
When the words are visually similar, a cursory proofreading doesn’t catch them either. For example, decide/deicide. The former is when you make a choice, the latter is when you kill a god. Compassion/compression, pursue/peruse, anyone/any one…
The only answer is to read and reread your submission before it goes out. I am not happy admitting that after I thought I had proofed something to death, I’ve sent blotchy fruit to market. If and when I discover it, I make every effort to fix the problem.
One tip I’ve just started using is reading sentences backwards. I am told that doing this helps give a ‘fresh eye’ when proofreading. I can tell you it feels strange, but does get me looking at words as words instead of parts of a sentence with meaning and context.
The best technique I’ve found so far is to reread a piece a day or two after I have written it. I suppose that puts me more in the reader mode instead of the author mode. Unfortunately I am often too close to deadline for this to be an option.
The only thing I can assure you of is even when one particular buyer doesn’t notice a usage error, their readers will. And there isn’t an upside. When you are selling your expertise, you just have to work as hard as you can to avoid goofs. Because no matter how well you make the rest of the piece, they are going to remember the flub.
Here’s one that appeared in my local paper, in an article about a car accident. “The cars ended up on top of each other.” There’s no spelling or grammar error there, but the impossibility of it made it memorable.
Let them remember your prose for its power and imagery, not because you had a ‘wardrobe malfunction’.
Add another to your list:
gaffes, not gaffs!
I actually had to look it up to discover that according to the American Heritage Dictionary you can use gaff rather than gaffe. I was about to jump on you for that one too.
However what I really wanted to mention was another trick for proofreading. If you write on screen print it out and proof on paper using a different font and size than you wrote it in. For example if you normally use Times New Roman 12 to write in, print and proof it in Courier New 14 or if your eyes can take it even Arial 14. Making it look different lets you approach your work with fresh eyes.
What’s the phrase? “I’d rather be lucky than skilled.”
I’m glad Dave backed me up, but truly, I slipped up and would have used gaffe if I had noticed it. I got lucky and thinking about it, I would use gaff for a hook or spike (like for pulling fish in the boat or for climbing a tree).
It perfectly illustrates the point though. Spell-check doesn’t know what you want to say.
PS, and now I can’t edit my post to fix my gaffe, because Michelle’s comment is so tasty.
It’s a pity I didn’t swoop in when that comment first appeared. In my infinite maturity (as expressed through my high-brow writing here), I would have unleashed such comic gold as saying “pwnt.”
There’s also
Allude/Elude
I got this one (above) from reading a health newsletter where the writer kept ‘eluding’ to things mentioned earlier in the piece – yes, truly…
And…
Affluence/Effluence