Sure,you know how to write, but do you ever notice how other people's
writing contains some really stupid errors? You think to yourself:
"How can this person, who has been to college, make so many mistakes?
I no longer love him, my firstborn son." And when that happens,
don't you then take a moment's pause and ask yourself, "Do I make
any stupid errors like that?" Of course you do! Someone could
be reading something you wrote right now and noticing that you
failed to match a pronoun with an antecedent. A smug smile is
spreading over that person's face, and he is thinking, "That sorry
chimp can't write his way out of a wet paper bag." Can you stand
that? We sure can't. So we looked into it, and we compiled a list
of the most common writing errors people who are otherwise good
writers tend to make. This is not a primer on grammar
or essay-writing. This is a checklist of things which you might
well do and which you must STOP doing. We will tell you the correct
way to do things. Ready?
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The
subject in a sentence has to agree with the verb. This means that
the verb has to be correctly inflected (i.e., have the right ending)
to match the subject. You know, of course, that you mustn't write
things like "You has to go," so we won't bother with
the basics. There is, however, an error that you might make without
ever noticing, and you must stop. Take a look at this:
"Pavel
Bure is a faster skater than him."
If
that looks right to you, you are dead wrong. This is because both
"Pavel Bure" and "him" are both using the same verb, "is." The sentence
is a comparison of what Pavel Bure and some other shmuck can do,
but the second use of the verb is assumed and left out. If it were
included, the sentence would read like this: "Pavel Bure is a faster
skater than him is." That would be so wrong. The correct way to
write the phrase is this: "Pavel Bure is a faster skater than he."
If that sounds funny to you, we recommend that you include the second
instance of the verb, i.e., "Pavel Bure is a faster skater than
he is." The wrong way: "Belinda is prettier than her," "We wreck
shop at a higher level than them," and "John eats more toast than
me." The right way: "Belinda is prettier than she," "We wreck shop
at a higher level than they do," and "John eats more toast than
I." People make this error so often that it's difficult to keep
it out of your speech, but if you're careful you can eliminate it
from your writing and give your critics one less reason to smirk.
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