Pet Peeve #268: Top 10 Office English Mistakes

[thatcrazycajun]

In two decades and more of corporate-world copy editing, first as a typesetter and layout artist and then as a desktop publisher, I have run into a truly appalling quantity and variety of other people's egregious mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation and syntax. Not meaning to seem arrogant or conceited, I speak as someone who scored in the upper 2% of students nationally in the English portion of the SAT and ACT college tests in 1981. For more information on such mistakes, see the excellent book, The Mac Is Not A Typewriter by Robin Williams (no, not the male comedian, but a female desktop publishing and Macintosh expert).

I know some of you on my flist or in my growing readership share my frustration with those who can't seem to use the mother tongue properly even when they supposedly grew up speaking it and nothing else. (How much you wanna bet a lot of those folks who make so much noise demanding laws to make English the only language used in this country can't even use it correctly themselves?) Anyhow, I thought I'd post this and invite y'all to compare notes. Here we go...

MY TOP 10 DUMBASSED, AVOIDABLE MISTAKES IN OFFICE ENGLISH

10. Putting an apostrophe after a plural, especially one that ends with a number ("the 1980's"). Apostrophes are for use only with possessives ("John's car," "the company's files") and contractions ("don't," "we've"). Plurals ending in numbers should have only an "s" after them. Plural possessives ending with "s" are properly punctuated with an apostrophe and nothing else after the "s" ("Dennis' shorts," not "Dennis's shorts"). As nancylebov puts it on one of her buttons, "An apostrophe does NOT mean 'Beware of oncoming S'!"

9. Putting periods, exclamation points, etc. outside the quote marks at the end of a sentence ("He claims to seek 'the truth'.") Cases such as this should always end with the closing quote mark ("She called herself 'Flora.'"), not the ending mark.

8. Putting two spaces after the end of a sentence in typeset text. This arose [so says Ms. Williams, and I believe her] from the days when office documents were largely produced on typewriters, and there was no other way to distinguish the end of a sentence from any other space between words in a page filled with monospaced typewriter text. In actual set type, however, the letters are not all the same width (at least, in typefaces not deliberately designed as monospaced), nor are the spaces between letters and words, so this is not necessary and just creates ugly gaps in typeset text, particularly in larger font sizes.

7. Hitting the tab key several times to create indented text (also known as "fake tabs"). This causes uneven indents in typeset type and confuses the computer when you have to import it into a table and the word processing software determines the cell number and placement by the number of tabs in a line. Causes lots of reflow and extra work for your typesetter (me). Use the tab markers in your word processor's text ruler—that's what they're flippin' put there for!

6. Mixing up homonyms (words that sound alike but mean entirely different things). Imation, a new company spun off from the 3M conglomerate, spent thousands of dollars to have a slogan developed to show that the new company's products would still have the same 3M quality and reputation. What they got was [sic]: "Borne of 3M Innovation." Borne with an "e" means "carried on or by," whereas I think what they really wanted to say was "born" (created from or out of). Computer word processing software often lets this happen because its spell checker can't distinguish context and so doesn't flag a word it recognizes from its dictionary. Confusing "principal" (an adjective meaning first in importance, or noun meaning the person who runs a public school) and "principle" (noun meaning a scientific or ethical tenet) is another common example of homonymic brain-farts.

5. Using the adjective "bold" as a verb, as in "Don't forget to bold the price in that line." The proper phrasing is "Don't forget to put the price in bold type" or "... in boldface." "Bolding" is not only incorrect, it's as grating an irritant to anyone who really knows proper English as off-key singing is to one born with perfect pitch (I happen to be both).

4. Putting a comma before the word "and" when three or more objects are grouped together in a sentence, as in "We carry bolts, nuts, and flanges." After all, you wouldn't write, "We carry bolts, and flanges" if there were just two, would you? So why would you use a comma before "and" when there are three or more, except to insult your reader's intelligence by assuming s/he won't really perceive more than two without that last extra comma?

3. Separating several long dependent clauses in a sentence with commas rather than semicolons, or better yet, with letters or numbers such as A) B) C) or 1) 2) 3). This makes for tiresome, unclear reading as well as harder typesetting. Didn't your grade-school English teachers warn you about "run-on sentences"? Mine did.

2. Insisting on punctuating the abbreviation for "United States" with periods ("in the U.S.") when no other sets of initials in the document have periods ("USSR," "CIA," "ATM" etc.). This is just plain inconsistency, but some people feel that it lacks something without those two dots. What, I can't possibly imagine. (And how about that comma some people stubbornly stick in front of "etc."?)

And the number one office English mistake (drumroll, please)...

1. Spelling the damn words wrong! A rather large publishing house recently put out thousands of copies of the paperback edition of Nancy Kress' science-fiction novel, Beggars Ride (third in an excellent trilogy about near-future genetic engineering on humans and the socioeconomic and cultural consequences thereof) with the first word spelled "BEGGERS" in big, bold all-caps type on the cover. If some typesetter or editor didn't get hauled on the carpet for that, we should fear for the literacy of future generations even more than previously thought. And I once worked on graphics for a compliance manual prepared for a major customer with binders whose spines contained the spelling "MANUNUAL." I was the first one to catch the error out of easily half a dozen people through whose hands this job passed. If your software's spell checker isn't doing the job, those big thick books up on the shelf with "DICTIONARY" on their spines work just as nicely.

***
So...do you agree with my list? Do you have your own horror stories of corporate mangling of the language? Or do you just think I'm an obsessive-compulsive geek with too much time on his hands who needs to get a grip? (You'd be right, as it happens, but still...) Post here in any of the above cases.

Comments

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Having both copyedited for a long time and worked in DTP for about as long, I have some bones to pick with you:

#8. This is a minor problem, and one easily fixed with a global search-and-replace. While it is a relic, and one that modern word processors handle (in fact, they handle it BETTER in justified text than in ragged right, because in the latter, the two spaces are allowed to stand as wide, while in the former they may get compressed), it's not, I find, such a big deal.

#7. Worse than several tabs is some large number of spaces. Both can be settled by repeated search-and-replace, but they're a royal pain. Both are indicators of documents prepared by nonprofessionals, and the multiple-space spacing (or, similarly, using numerous paragraph marks/line breaks for vertical spacing) is what we at my office call "secretary syndrome."

#5. This is just picky. It's an error, but certainly not as egregious as the practice of "verbing nouns" that came into vogue during the 1990s. And it's nowhere NEARLY as atrocious as the word "doable."

#4. Serial commas are a matter of significant debate among text stylists. There is some validity to your assertion that they're unnecessary, and the style in certain types of business text is to omit them.

However, they're useful and important for clarity, and I come down with the (many) style guides that suggest their use. In any event, to state categorically that their use is a business error is itself egregiously inaccurate, and, I daresay, wrong. (NOT using a serial comma is something I repeatedly rail about at work, where their lack frequently introduces ambiguity -- and when you're talking about multibillion-dollar deals, ambiguity is very unwelcome.)

#3. I agree with you, multiple clauses that themselves include commas ought to be separated with semicolons. However, I have no significant problem with denoting the clauses with numbers or letters, especially when there's a reason to refer back to them (see formal legal documents for good examples of this). However, for clarity, I'd generally prefer that really long sentences of this type be broken into lists, vertically, however (e.g., "We have several problems:
(a)...
(b)...
...
(g).")

#2. Yes and no. If U.S., then U.K. and U.S.S.R. It does not necessarily follow that therefore also A.T.M., as that's moved into current usage without the periods (whether you mean "automatic teller machine" or "at the moment" is irrelevant :-) But the parallel cases ought to be punctuated similarly.

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

Re your complaints above:

#5: I do agree with you about verbing of nouns, but I never had a problem with "doable" myself. (As my Songbird and Nancy like to say, "It's not the verbing that weirds the language, it's the renounification." :-) )

#4: I wasn't taking issue with the use of commas per se, but rather with the addition of the extraneous one at the end of the sequence. This may be the result of my not understanding your use of the term "serial comma," granted.

#3: I too prefer the vertical-list suggestion you made for really long sentences of the type described, and try to encourage those I do typing for to use this method.

[redaxe.livejournal.com]

Serial comma: the final comma in a sequence such as "me, myself, and I" (that would be the comma before "and"). It is, IMO and that of many other people, extremely useful and frequently indispensible for clarity. To call it "extraneous" is an argument against clarity; while it is occasionally not required to deliver a clear meaning, it often is, and in those cases, it's virtually mandatory.

[joyeuse13.livejournal.com]

#8 is not necessarily an error, it's mainly a habit formed by anyone who learned to type in the 80s and earlier. And frankly, sentences with only one space at the end look weird to me.

#5 is called "conversion," and it's a common feature of the English language. Happens all the time; you might as well relax and accept it. Doubt me? Google it. ;)

#4 was once perfectly acceptable. It's not wrong, simply old. Language and its acceptable use changes all the time.

#2: another older usage. Non-acronymic abbreviations without periods are fairly recent, possibly coinciding with the new state abbreviations developed by the post office.

My biggest pet peeve is the mixup of its and it's. People seem to think that all possessives need an apostrophe--but somehow no one worries about our's, their's, her's and hi's.

[mdlbear]

I take issue with several of these, at least in technical writing.

9. It's harmless to put punctuation marks inside quotations in dialog. It's fatal when the quotation marks delimit something -- a command, for example -- where an unwary user or reader might reasonably expect punctuation. There's a big difference between, for example, "foo." and "foo", so if one of the latter appears at the end of a sentence I'd expect to see the period outside the quotes. In the case of the former, I'd recommend an extra period outside the quotes, i.e., "foo.". It's best to get into the habit of not putting punctuation inside quoted material unless it was there to begin with. (It's my understanding that this usage is common in Europe.)

8. In typeset material, the space between sentences is properly one and a half times the space between words. If you're using a typesetting program like LaTeX, it will do the right thing. Most word processors won't, so there's simply nothing you can do to get them to do the right thing. Two spaces is a reasonable approximation, and one could hope that some layout programs, at least, will recognize two consecutive spaces as a ligature for a wide space.

6. I'd put mixing up homonyms closer to the head of the list; it's becoming more common now that most word processors -- and even web browsers -- have spelling checkers built in.

5. English has been verbing nouns and adjectives for centuries. I'll grant you that "embolden" would be more correct than "bold", and I consider "authoring" a barbarism (it ranks close to the top of my personal list), but "bold" is at least pretty close to the line. It may be jargon at the moment, but so was "type" a century or so ago. It used to be "typewriter". ("Author" as a verb is a barbarism because "write" is an existing verb with a long and respectable lineage and one less syllable. "List", on the other hand, is a perfectly respectable and shorter construct for "make a list". And the list goes on.)

4. I was taught that the comma before "and" is optional; it is usually rendered in speech as a pause. In addition. it avoids ambiguity in lists such as "hyphens, left and right parentheses, and commas".

[cellio]

Punctuation and quotes: emphatically seconded. Correctness trumps an obsolete typesetting convention. We don't need to worry about small pieces of lead type falling out any more.

I do most of my writing in a text editor, in XML (which will later be rendered into other formats). I always include the double space after a sentence. It makes it easier for me to work with the source, and any formatting engine worthy of resepct will adjust the whitespace. That Word apparently can't is Word's problem.

I use serial commas. The example I found convincing was: "I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God.".

[mdlbear]

Oh. "Upper 2%" -- I got a perfect score on the English SAT in 1964, if I remember correctly. I'm not sure where that placed me in the percentile ranking; I have the distinct impression that our schools have gotten considerably less rigorous since I was young.

[zsero.livejournal.com]

If you're railing against people "who can't seem to use the mother tongue properly", then this list misses the mark so badly that it reflects on your own notion of what is proper English. Most of these items are: 1) matters of opinion, and yours (or Ms Williams's) is not privileged; 2) nothing to do with English usage; or 3) both.

#10: This is entirely a matter of what style book you choose to follow. If you're writing for a company or publisher, and it has one, follow it; otherwise follow your own. I happen to agree with you that "the 1980s" and "RPGs" don't need apostrophes, but some perfectly respectable style books say to put them in. I certainly disagree with you about "Dennis's shoes". The only names ending in 's' whose possessives do not take an 's' after the apostrophe are those of well-known historical figures like Jesus and Moses, who are essentially grandfathered in. But my point here is that neither of us is wrong, and denouncing others' command of the language for merely differing from our own style preferences is foolish.

#9: Sorry, you are wrong, wrong, wrong. It is true that most USAn style books agree with your usage, but it is illogical and unclear, and in any case merely a preference. I certainly have every right to follow non-USAn style books in this (as in most) matters, without being accused of illiteracy.

#8: This has nothing to do with English usage. The language didn't change with the introduction of word processors. It may be an error when using a proportional font on a word processor, but that is entirely another matter.

#7: Ditto.

#6: As a mistake in English, this is the same as #1. It's a separate item in Ms Williams's list, not as a mistake in English but as a common mistake made by people using word processors: relying on the spell checker. If the spell checker passes your document, then you know that every word it contains is a valid word; if you don't proofread it yourself, the odds are good that several of those valid words are not the ones you intended. A corollary to this rule is that you need to know the difference between the word the spell checker picked and the one you intended. Which brings us back to #1.

#5: Verbing nouns and nouning verbs is part of English. It only annoys me when there's already a perfectly good word for what you want to say, and there's no stylistic reason for you to prefer making one up, leading me to suspect that you simply didn't know the correct word. For instance, "burglarise" is a verb; "burglar" is a noun derived from that verb; "burgle" is a neologism backformed from "burglar" by people who don't know "burglarise". But it doesn't bother me if there's a reason for using it, e.g. for better scansion.

#4: The serial comma. You are wrong. The serial comma is always acceptable (unless your employer's or publisher's style book forbids it), and often necessary, as one legendary writer learned the hard way when her book came out dedicated "To my parents, God and Ayn Rand".

#3: Run-on sentences may be unclear, but they are not incorrect English. People who use them may have poor writing skills, but it's unfair to accuse them of poor command of the language. And sometimes sentences can be both long and clear. There's no word limit on them.

#2: Again, not a matter of English usage but of style. I agree that inconsistent style within the same document distracts the reader, and is a bad thing. My own preferred style is never to use dots in such terms, but it's equally acceptable always to use them. But an inconsistent and distracting style is not the same as poor command of the language.

#1: You're right about this one, command of a language includes being able to spell the words one uses.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

I agree with some and disagree with others; there is a lot of debate over stylistic things (which is why we have different style guides. *grin*)

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to get less dogmatic about many of these, but I'm not going to mention all of them here. Just a few.

10. Step back and reread that sentence about plural possessives:
Plural possessives ending with "s" are properly punctuated with an apostrophe and nothing else after the "s" ("Dennis' shorts," not "Dennis's shorts").

Without the example, it makes perfect, though incomplete, sense: for example, "the teachers' lounge":

• the possessor is plural: teachers
  
• the possessor ends in "s" which marks plurality
  
• therefore, the possessive is formed by adding just an apostrophe
  

But your example doesn't match this at all:

• the possessor, "Dennis", is singular. The fact that the modified noun, "shorts", is (grammatically) plural is irrelevant.
  
• the possessor ends in "s", but that has nothing to do with its number
  
• I would prefer the possessive form that you scorn, "Dennis's shorts", just as I would write and say "Dennis's lunch". Would you use "Dennis' lunch"?
  
• I think you are confusing this case with the somewhat debatable situation of too many sibilants, which is sometimes enshrined as a special rule for names from antiquity, as in "Jesus' sayings". If you prefer "Dennis' shorts" to "Dennis's shorts" to avoid the sequence [ˈdɛnɪsɨzˈʃɔɹts] I won't argue, but use the right reason.

9. "Did he say 'Stop!'?"
Surely you wouldn't write that as
"Did he say 'Stop!?'"
-- I hope. And when techno geeks are talking about text strings, it is essential to be precise about the content of the string under discussion. This usage, not surprisingly and not deprecably, is spreading as more and more people deal with computers and computer analysis of text.

6. (Growwwllll.) This sets me bristling, too.

5. Using the adjective "bold" as a verb, as in "Don't forget to bold the price in that line." The proper phrasing is "Don't forget to put the price in bold type" or "... in boldface." "Bolding" is not only incorrect, it's as grating an irritant to anyone who really knows proper English as off-key singing is to one born with perfect pitch (I happen to be both).

Oh, sir and friend, I seriously disagree. I do not have perfect pitch, but I do know proper English. There is a long tradition of inveighing against innovation because it's not the way we used to do it, therefore it's not the way we should do it. Tell me, how do you describe inputting a telephone number on a touchtone keypad? I say "dial a number", and I was quite surprised the first time I heard someone object to it because "a keypad isn't a dial". Well, if you're going to be like that about it (I replied), you should also object to calling anything a "dial" that isn't related to the day (from hypothesized Latin diālis 'relating to a day'), specifically the original "dial", which we now call a sundial. How far are you willing to take circumlocution?

4. I was going to quote Dr. Whom here with the Ayn Rand example, but I see that zsero has beat me to it.

And if you want to say "Only put it in when there is a chance of ambiguity or misunderstanding", you are asking people to always check -- essentially, to always proofread their own writing, even casually, stepping outside of their mind and putting aside their own understanding of what they wrote. And we (here) all know the dangers of trying to proofread your own writing.

1. Spelling the damn words wrong!
Amen and amen!
A rather large publishing house recently put out thousands of copies of the paperback edition of Nancy Kress' * science-fiction novel, Beggars Ride
No apostrophe?
* See #10 above.