As a previous article (“Making Better Word Choices – 4 Examples”) explained, writers can take steps to prevent simple, and common, errors from degrading their writing. Five areas of writing that cause authors problems are discussed in this article.Split Infinitives First let us exam
famously frowned upon split infinitive. Maybe some readers do not know, or do not remember, what a split infinitive is exactly. To understand split infinitives readers must first remember what constitutes an infinitive. An infinitive is a phrase that includes a verb preceded by word “to,” such as, “to play” or “to investigate.” Now that we know what an infinitive is maybe we remember our English teachers lecturing us against “splitting” them. Simply put, a split infinitive is when a writer puts a word between word “to” and associated verb. Therefore, a split infinitive would look something like following examples:
He was going to quickly investigate theft. Tommy likes to neatly color in his book.
These two examples would be re-written as shown below.
He was going to investigate theft quickly. OR He was quickly going to investigate theft.
Tommy likes to color neatly in his book. OR Tommy likes to color in his book neatly.
Splitting infinitives is not criticized to degree it has been in past. As many reputable sources explain, occasionally splitting an infinitive is acceptable. Even some progressive English teachers will agree with this idea. Compact Oxford Online Dictionary explains that rule for not splitting infinitives was based on an analogy to Latin, a language that writes infinitives as one word, such as bibere ‘to drink.’ The decision to argue with an English teacher about acceptance of splitting infinitives is your decision to make. As Oxford states, “…in standard English use of split infinitives is broadly accepted as both normal and useful.1” If you do decide to argue with an English teacher, feel free to point out that people such as John Donne, William Wordsworth, and Benjamin Franklin split infinitives at will. The larger problem occurs when a writer consistently splits their infinitives. If splitting infinitive helps with emphasis or statement flows better go ahead and split infinitive.
Superlatives and Comparatives Writers should also strive to use superlatives and comparatives correctly. Some cases of incorrect use may sound okay, but if author remembers rules that they learned for using superlatives and comparatives they will realize that they have made error. For example when a sentence is written as below it sounds correct, but it is not.
One of most common mistakes a cook makes is not using fresh ingredients.
In this example, lack of fresh ingredients is either a common mistake or it is most common mistake; there generally cannot be two, or more, most common mistakes. A case where there can be two “mosts” is in an exact tie. For example, if 20 mistakes are made and two of them occur six times each (making up 12 of 20 mistakes) and remaining eight mistakes are all different, then two mistakes that occurred six times each could be labeled as most common mistakes.
The sentence below shows another way that a comparative can be written incorrectly.
Of three dogs, bulldog was smaller.
To use a comparative there needs to be something compared to something else. The bulldog either was smallest of three dogs or was smaller than another dog in group. Both sentences below are written correctly.
The bulldog was smaller than German shepherd and St. Bernard. The bulldog was smallest of three dogs.
A third sentence, shown below would also be correct.
The bulldog was smaller than other two dogs.
This is written correctly because bulldog is compared to a pair. It is clear from sentence that other two dogs, by being grouped together, are larger than bulldog.
