Web design for the disadvantaged.

Help with writing in English.

Writing well takes attention to what you want to say and the knowledge and discipline to say it clearly and simply. A place to start is this list frequent errors in English usage. They can help you focus on common errors, logic and common sense.

Constance Hale: Seven Deadly Sins

No one would accuse Joan Didion of being a grammar slouch. Yet here’s how she once described her knowledge: “Grammar is a piano I play by ear, since I seem to have been out of school the year the rules were mentioned. All I know about grammar is its infinite power.”

Most of us also sense we missed some lessons along the way. But few of us can claim Joan Didion’s ear. It can take years to master the nuances of syntax, but it doesn’t take long to learn a few critical basics. “The seven deadly sins” are grammatical errors I see time and time again:

its v. it’s. Many of us may have learned our grade-school grammar too well. “Apostrophe s” is the sign for possession, right? So when an it owns something, we write it’s. But it’s is a contraction of it is. And contractions trumps possessives. So its is the possessive, as in “I love grammar and all its idiosyncracies.”

they v. he or she. He or she is cumbersome when you don’t know a person’s gender. We used to use the masculine he. Modern feminism made that unpalatable. Many writers try to be politically correct, using they, and end up grammatically incorrect. If gender is unknown, you have three good choices: 1) use he or she; 2) pick he in some instances, she in others; 3) make the antecedent plural and use they. (Instead of “a person must speak his or her mind” write “people must speak their minds.”

between you and I. Between is a preposition, and prepositions must be followed by objects. This means that the pronoun here must be me not I. Between you and me is correct.

who v. whom. Who is pronoun we use for the subject of a sentence, as in “Who called?” Whom is the pronoun we use for the object of a sentence, as in “You called whom?”

good v. well. How many times have you heard a sentence like “This car runs good”? Get this straight: Good is an adjective; it modifies a noun. Well is an adverb; it modifies a verb, adjective, or other adverb. When a chef cooks well, a good steak is the result. When a writer writes well, the prose is good

fewer v. less. When you see a grocery store sign reading “12 items or fewer,” congratulate the manager. Fewer is the correct adjective when the noun it modifies is a plural comprising multiple units. Less is the correct adjective when the noun it modifies is something that is a mass, or an idea, rather than a number of units. Nonfat milk has fewer calories than whole milk; we should have less Coke in our diet than milk.

lay v. lie. Learn this to stay a step ahead of most writers and editors. Lay is a transitive verb. It must have an object to complete its meaning: A chicken lays eggs. Lie is an intransitive verb. It needs no object to make sense: The dog lies down. (Down is an adverb.)

All of us commit these sins – it’s hard not to when we keep hearing the wrong thing. But let a red flag pop up every time you use one of these terms. Stop and walk through the grammar. Then relax and have fun writing.

And this from a letter by C. S Lewis to an admirer:

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn’t mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

4. In writing. Don’t use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was “terrible,” describe it so that we’ll be terrified. Don't say it was “delightful”; make us say “delightful” when we’ve read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, “Please will you do my job for me.”

5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say “infinitely” when you mean “very”; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

And H. P. Lovecraft’s Advice to Aspiring Writers

  1. Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
  2. Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
  3. Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
  4. Ambiguous use of pronouns.
  5. Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
  6. Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
  7. Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
  8. Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
  9. Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
  10. The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
  11. The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
  12. False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
  13. Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
  14. Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
  15. The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
  16. Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
  17. Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
  18. Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
  19. Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
  20. Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.