GrammarPhile Blog

While reading an article recently on 29 famous people who failed before they succeeded, I came across these two sentences:

[Walt Disney] went onto become the guy who redefined American childhood.

[Thomas Edison] went onto be fired from his first two jobs for not being suitably productive.

And voilà! A blog post was born. Any idea why? Here’s a hint: It’s not about Mickey Mouse and light bulbs. No, the inspiration is smaller than that. Much smaller. Four letters to be precise — o n t o — and the spacing between them.

With the celebration of the American flag on Independence Day and the recent flap around the Confederate battle flag, now seems a good time to talk about red flags in proofreading — the sneaky errors in documents that are easy to overlook, especially if you’re self-editing.

Thanks to everyone who took our proofreading quiz last week. Congratulations to Arlene Gregoire, who missed just three of the 51 errors, including some of the sneakiest ones.

The mistakes that tripped up most people appeared in the second and third sentences of paragraph 3: decreases/increases insulin and hyper/hypoglycemic. These errors go beyond basic grammar and punctuation mistakes, many of which Microsoft Word will highlight, and require a closer read to ensure the text makes sense.

  School’s out (or nearly out) across the nation and summer vacation beckons. We thought another proofreading quiz would be a good way to kick off the summer fun.

The five numbered paragraphs below are laced with errors — some glaring and some that are less obvious. But they’re all unequivocally wrong. Acceptable variations — such as words with different spellings (e.g., advisor, adviser) or sentences that could be punctuated multiple ways — are not included here.

This week we wrap up our three-part miniseries on pronouns by taking on one of the most hotly debated grammar questions — the use of like versus as — and how your choices will dictate which pronouns you use.

Mark Twain may not have been talking about pronouns when he said “Comparison is the death of joy,” but the sentiment somehow fits. Just ask anyone who struggles with figuring out which pronouns to use with comparatives such as than, as and like.

How can three little words wreak so much havoc with pronouns? The short answer is that all three words can perform multiple functions in a sentence, and when the function isn’t clear, the resulting usage is mixed.

Being an editor means never having time off. If only we could flip a switch to turn off whatever mechanism it is that forces us to notice spelling and grammatical errors everywhere. Sure, sometimes it’s a source of amusement, like this sign I saw while eating breakfast across the street from that establishment, but much of the time it’s downright painful.

Last week, we talked about remedying the content and stylistic inconsistencies often found in large documents — specifically, the importance of getting a handle on how your final document should look before you begin writing. This week, we narrow the focus to talk about how to bridge the gap between your vision and the final product.

That’s where templates, style sheets and style guides come in handy. They allow you to create the stylistic elements you want and to apply them uniformly throughout the document to ensure unparalleled consistency. We provide an overview of these tools below, without detailing how to create them (online tutorials abound on how to create templates and style sheets in Word, and we’ll talk in a future post about how to develop your own style guide).

We edit a fair number of large documents, often put together by multiple people or teams. Each project has its idiosyncrasies, but a common problem among nearly all of them is a lack of consistency, stemming from different:

• Writing styles
• Page layout/structure
• Graphics formatting/style
• Heading and text styles
• Word choice/usage
• Mechanics (punctuation and, particularly, capitalization)