Commonly Made Suggestions
I am getting a tremendous amount of mail about this site. I enjoy the compliments, try to answer the queries, and ignore the occasional insult. (One wit wrote of my site: “I could care less!” Cute.) The volume of correspondence has exceeded my ability to respond to all of it; so please forgive me if you don’t hear back from me. I do read your letters.
And although I appreciate good prose (with real capital letters), don’t be afraid I’ll nitpick your letter for writing flaws. I don’t normally critique other people’s writing unless I’m hired to.
I also receive many suggestions for additions. These are usually welcome, and I adopt many of them; but at least half my mail involves points I have already covered in one way or another. If you would be so kind, please go through the following checklist before writing me.
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If your first encounter with my site was through a link to the list of errors, please go to the introductory page and read that first. If you are creating a link to my site, please link to that page at http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/; otherwise users will miss important introductory remarks. The “:8080”string found in some links is obsolete.
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If you think a common error is missing from my list, check by searching with the “Find” command in your Web browser. A surprising number of people don’t know that they can search the text of any Web page with their browsers, but it’s a trick worth learning. What the eye misses, the browser may catch. The most efficient way to search the whole site is by using the text version of the site.
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Other places to look: “More Errors,” “Commonly misspelled words,” and “Non-Errors.”
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This is not a general English grammar site, nor am I a grammarian. I am a literature professor interested in English usage, some of which involves grammar. You will find a list of comprehensive English grammar and writing sites at the bottom of my list of errors under “Other Good Resources.” These are the folks to ask for help with your writing.
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This is not a site offering a tutorial service for people studying English. In my list of links on the main pages listing errors I include sites which do and which provide resources for the study of English as a second language. Try one of them instead. I am not an ESL specialist and have a full-time job which does not involve online interactive teaching. I hope you find what I have written useful and I do answer occasional questions, but this site does not provide a detailed question-and-answer service.
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If you have checked thoroughly and still want to write me, please feel free; but be aware that I do not have time to deal with all my correspondence. “Common Errors” is not my main Web project, and I work on it only sporadically (sometimes not for many months at a stretch). To see what other sorts of things I spend my time on, check out my home page and the World Civilizations site I manage.
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If you believe I have not sent you a response you deserve, consider these possibilities before deciding that I am deliberately not answering you: 1) I may be travelling and not doing e-mail, 2) your return address may be incorrect, causing my replies to you to “bounce” (if you rarely get replies to your e-mails, this is a good possibility), or 3) you are a new AOL user who has erred on the side of caution by blocking all incoming correspondence by people unknown to you.
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Before writing me, check the following list of commonly made suggestions.
Add “would of”
Look under “C” for “could of/should of/would of.”
You shouldn’t end a sentence with a preposition.
Nonsense. See the second item under “Non-Errors.”
You should say “Write to me” rather than “Write me.”
Some people following the British tradition object to this usage; it’s standard in the U.S. The expression probably evolved in analogy to expressions like “call me,” “phone me” and “tell me.” In the U.S., “write me” will do just fine in informal writing such as I use on this site.
The word is “pernickety,” not “persnickety.”
The original Scottish dialect form was indeed “pernickety,” but Americans changed it to “persnickety” a century ago, and “pernickety” is generally unknown in the U.S. The Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary calls “pernickety” obsolete, but judging from my correspondence, it’s still in wide use across the Atlantic.
Americans have it all wrong, the correct usage is English (Canadian, Australian, etc.).
Read my page called “The President’s English.”
A name which ends in an S needs an additional S after the apostrophe when it is made possessive, e.g., “Paul Brians’s Page.”
Some styles call for the extra S, some don’t. I was forced by the publisher of my second book to follow this rule and I swore I would never do it again. I think it’s ugly.
Please add [some particularly obscure word].
This site is concerned with common errors in English, not bizarre or esoteric ones, although I often enjoy reading about them. I admit to discussing some not-so-common errors if I find them amusing enough.
What is the correct spelling of _________?
Please try a dictionary first. The best on-line one is the WWWebster Dictionary (Merriam-Webster)
I was always taught X but all the authorities I’ve looked in say Y. What’s happening to the English language?
It’s changing—always has changed, and always will. When you reach the point that nobody seems to agree with your standard of usage any more, you may have simply been left behind. There is no ultimate authority in language—certainly not me—nor any measure of absolute “correctness.” The best guide is the usage of literate and careful speakers and writers, and when they differ among themselves one has to make a choice as to which one prefers. My goal is to keep my readers’ writing and speech from being laughed at or groaned over by average literate people.
How can you possibly approve of ___________? Your effrontery in caving in to this ignorant nonsense is appalling [ranting, raving, foaming at the mouth . . .].
It’s odd how some people with high standards of correctness seem to have no notion of manners at all. You and I both know that I am not the most conservative of commentators on usage. If you want to make a logical case for a rule I don’t accept, please do so politely.
You should add more information about this word; it has other meanings than the ones you discuss.
My goal is to keep the entries as compact as possible, focusing only on those aspects of the words discussed which lend themselves to error. The sort of detailed discussion an unabridged dictionary provides is inappropriate here.
Your list of terms would be easier to read if it were arranged in a bulleted list.
Indeed it was when I had it arranged that way; but the list was extremely difficult to navigate because when users returned to it from an individual page they had to scroll up or down a long distance to find where they had left off or wanted to go next. I could arrange the terms in a table, but since I am constantly adding to the list it would create an impossible amount of work for me. I have resisted inserting breaks after each item to promote compactness. It’s a struggle to balance between legibility and navigational ease. I have made the list of terms alphabetical to make navigation a bit easier. Note that you can always download and print off the entire site as a single text document to peruse at your leisure. And remember that you can search any Web page, including my list of errors, with the “Find” command of your browser.
It would be easier to read through your site if you put navigational links on each page back to where the reader left off in the list of errors.
This site is designed for purposeful searches (use the “search” command on your browser’s “File” menu or just look down the list for the appropriate place in the alphabet”) and casual browsing. Few people set out to read their way in order through all the entries. But if you want to do this, I have provided a separate version of the site all on one page which is much more suitable for this purpose and will keep you from having to click through over a thousand pages.
You should provide a searchable database to make it easier to find items.
There are three reasons I don’t do this:
1) I can’t. The free university account this project runs on does not provide database software at all, and the desktop software I use to run some other databases cannot support anything like the huge traffic this site gets.
2) It would take too much of my time. Although this is my most popular site on the Web, it plays a very small role in my work. I’m glad to offer it as a service so long as I don’t have to spend a lot of time on it; but I’m unwilling to do the extra work it would take to maintain it as a database.
3) Even if I could, I wouldn’t want it to be a database. Most of my users need to browse. They read through the errors and discover to their surprise that certain patterns they use are nonstandard. Concealing the contents of the site behind a search page would interfere with this browsing pattern.
If you really want to search for an error in the current design, it’s pretty easy in any Web browser to go to the Edit menu and choose Find and enter the error you’re looking for. You should zip right to it.
Your site shows ugly gibberish wherever it should display quotation marks and apostrophes.
This site uses special codes to create properly curled quotation marks and apostrophes, and real dashes. Some browsers ignore the code and render the curled marks as straight ones, but other, older ones display the code itself. There are two solutions: 1) upgrade to a more recent version of your favorite browser, or 2) use the all-text version of the site which lacks the problem characters.
Note that with thousands of instances to be changed I had to use automatic global search-and-replace routines to curl these marks, and sometimes they misfired. I’ve tried hard to find the errors that resulted (typically a right quotation mark and a space where an apostrophe should be), but whenever I think I’ve found the last one somebody points out another. Keep ’em coming: I do really want to get all of these fixed.
Why don’t you say when you last updated your site?
You’ll find the latest revision date at the bottom of the all-text version of the site.
You should refer your readers to the on-line versions of Strunk and Fowler.
Well, I just did, didn’t I? But not with enthusiasm. Because of copyright restrictions these are both very early editions (1918 and 1908!). If you’re looking for confirmation of your views you may find solace, but the average reader has no way of knowing whether their advice still makes sense today. Would you use a 1908 dictionary to determine the meaning of a word now?
You left out one of my pet peeves!
I may simply not have gotten around to it yet, but remember to use “find” to search the index of errors.
Still want to write? My address is brians@wsu.edu. Please don’t call me “Brian.” My name is Paul Brians.
DIarsipkan di bawah: MATERI KULIAH, TOPIK-TOPIK TERBARU
