
Common Errors in English Usage - georgecmu
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/errors.html
======
JangoSteve
I thought this looked familiar. Then I realized it's because I've submitted it
before ;-)

Original link: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502209>

Quite illustrative that links do indeed tend to fall off the newest page too
soon. When posted 83 days ago, it got 1 upvote.

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edanm
For a much better look at English grammar, check out Grammar Girl:
<http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/>

Her blog covers English usage and grammar issues in simple, "quick and dirty"
tips. So you'll usually get a quick explanation of why something works the way
it does, and then get a quick tip explaining how to remember it.

I also bought her book (which is just collected posts from the blog.)

~~~
jan_g
Just checked her site and it's really good. Thanks for the tip.

I have found one interesting tip regarding braces, brackets and parantheses.
While I use all three of them all the time, she says that brackets and braces
are seldom used. Moreover, she asserts that most probably many of readers have
never used braces. And she is right. Just shows how different the world seems
to her compared to what it seems to me.

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pigbucket
Maybe a list of common errors in English usage would be more useful if it were
a manageable list. How about the 20 most common errors in usage. I'd bet (but
surely there are some studies on this) that the following would appear near or
close to the top of the list:

it's for its; there for their; alright for all right; 'the reason is because',
for 'the reason is that'; dangling modifiers; missing or unclear pronominal
antecedents; and subject/verb agreement.

~~~
Terretta
Loose vs. lose comes up far too often here.

Also: <http://www.uta.edu/owl/top20.htm>

~~~
wyclif
I also notice a lot of "eke vs. eek" here. Turns out there's this property
called onomatopoeia that escapes many people.

~~~
hugh3
In fairness, "eke" is a rarely used word. No such excuses for
they're/there/their though.

~~~
wyclif
Whether it's used rarely or frequently, it's still incorrect and I see it all
over the place, which was my _point_...

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caudipublius
I believe this has already been posted to HN several times. It also appears
some of the word links are broken. ie oeuvre

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gxs
Does this happen to anyone? Sometimes, I don't make an error - I didn't know
it was an error that existed or that was commen - but upon reading about it, I
start making the error.

This is similar to when I read about psychological disorders and the like - it
seems like I learn about something and start acting it out in some weird way.

Long story short, sometimes I'd rather not read these lists of common errors.

~~~
BrandonM
Your comment made me wonder if _commen_ is a common misspelling of _common_.
It appears that's all you.

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fbnt
When in doubt, you can also use my little webapp: <http://phras.in>

It also works if you type something like this:
<http://phras.in/realize/realise>

_/shameless plug_

------
cubicle67
I bought the first edition of Bugs In Writing ([http://www.amazon.com/BUGS-
Writing-Revised-Guide-Debugging/d...](http://www.amazon.com/BUGS-Writing-
Revised-Guide-Debugging/dp/020137921X)) years ago, and have found it an
excellent reference.

It's aimed at technical writers and is a beautifully written book. Highly
reccomended.

[Edit: I've just been reading the reviews on Amazon, and it seems a few people
are put off by the 'cuteness' of the book, feeling it's not professional. The
book has a strong personality (if a book can have such a thing) and lots of
cat references/pics, so if you're likely to find that annoying it's not the
book for you. Myself, I liked it]

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kaffeinecoma
"Although digital clocks routinely label noon “12:00 PM” you should avoid this
expression not only because it is incorrect, but because many people will
imagine you are talking about midnight instead. "

Uh?

~~~
InclinedPlane
I highly suspect this is outdated advice. Technically there was some ambiguity
about whether 12pm/am would denote midnight or noon, since am/pm are relative
to noon. However, the computer age has utterly removed that ambiguity. 12pm is
noon, 12am is midnight. Digital clocks have spread familiarity with that
convention widely throughout the developed and developing world. I doubt there
is any serious confusion any longer.

I suspect that this is a piece of advice (avoiding the use of "12pm") which
particular crufty old newspaper editors hold onto dearly even though it has
passed out of utility.

~~~
pmjordan
You'll still confuse people (generally outside Anglo-American culture) who are
used to 24-hour digital clocks.

~~~
hugh3
If they've not familiar with pm timing, they'll be confused for the entire
afternoon, not just noon.

~~~
pmjordan
They'll almost certainly have encountered am/pm times before, but nobody
teaches you the 12pm = noon convention.

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maxogden
I just started a github repo to port these to a machine readable format

<http://github.com/maxogden/common-english-errors>

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philbarr
Is it just me, or does the phrase, "Common Errors in English Usage" sound
wrong? Shouldn't it be, "Common Errors in the Use of English"? So I checked on
their own site: <http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/usage.html>. I guess I'm
right. :)

~~~
sid0
How does it imply that you're right? "Common Errors in English Use" sounds
much worse to me.

~~~
philbarr
It says that, as a general rule, you should use 'use' instead of 'usage'. So I
reconstructed the sentence to make it use 'use'.

Also, the :) was intended to make it a bit of a joke.

~~~
sid0
> It says that, as a general rule, you should use 'use' instead of 'usage'.

Nowhere does it say that. It says that only if both seem appropriate
(obviously disallowing modifying the rest of the sentence -- that is clear
from the context and the example). In this case, "use" doesn't seem
appropriate at all.

~~~
philbarr
Ok, you win. Although again I would like to point you to the initial smily,
":)", meaning, "joke".

------
mgunes
> _Unlike asbestos removal, “as best as” removal is easy, and you don’t have
> to wear a hazmat suit._

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lars512
What a fantastic resource, and what a waste that it's in dead paper form (or
even web page form).

An automatic style checker would be far more useful, and I bet with some
machine learning you could crank out useful but conservative warnings for
every one of these entries.

------
maushu
<http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/their.html> This one.

For the love of all that is holy, if you have to read just one then read that
one.

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PaddyCorry
Effect / affect is a bugbear of mine, it pops up every now and again in bug
descriptions and so on i.e. "this bug has effected a number of users".

Great reference site, thanks.

------
slmbrhrt
"Fill this form OUT? You don't fill a form OUT, you fill it IN! Have we all
suddenly turned American?!?"

If only Hugh Laurie had any idea then about his role as Greg House.

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brc
It's great, but try reading the one on apostrophe's and see if you can still
get it right every single time. We need some sort of _academy anglaise_ to
make decisions on the language and exorcise the apostrophe once and for all.
Cursed thing it is.

~~~
drv
I'm pretty sure you made an apostrophe mistake in "apostrohpe's" - the "s" is
making "apostrophe" plural.

~~~
brc
That was a stab at irony, which apparently flew over the heads of most
readers.

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baddox
As I am always forced bring up in English grammar threads, without a formal
(decidable) grammar or an agreed-upon body of work to signify "common usage,"
there is no formal way to decide whether _any_ statement is grammatical
English.

~~~
nandemo
English isn't a formal language so it doesn't matter if there's no formal way
of deciding grammaticality.

Usage is mostly about imprecise, changing social conventions. That doesn't
imply that it's useless to talk about it. We can talk about language usage
more or less in the same way we talk about what to wear on such and such
occasion.

~~~
baddox
That's not how I think about things. If you claim that a certain statement is
"incorrect" English, to me that means you must have a decision procedure in
mind. Sure, most of the time it's "common sense" whether something is
grammatical: "The sky is blue" is fine and "They sky are blue" is wrong.
However, the same applies to deciding whether programs halt or not. Most
programs either halt quickly or are obviously infinite loops, yet we know a
decision procedure that works on arbitrary programs is impossible.

I'm not suggesting that talking about grammar is impossible or pointless. I'm
saying that for the discussion to make sense, there needs to be some formal
way to settle whether something is grammatical or not. You could try to make a
formal grammar for English, but that's probably futile. A better approach
would be to choose a list of written works as the English "canon" and judge
usage (hopefully as objectively as you can) against that body of work.

------
ja27
I often intentionally use these on people as sort of a test.

~~~
hugh3
Do you make a lot of friends that way?

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qjz
Gentlemen, start registering your quirky domain names!

------
werftgh
The point of English is that when they become common enough they become
correct.

