100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Beware these common mistakes
Ten ways to avoid grammatical errors

In addition to major grammatical mistakes, there are a good many minor mistakes to be made, and nobody’s hands are completely clean. We all have a few grammatical rules that we can never quite nail down despite our “ears” for language. Many people cannot remember the difference between who and whom. (Who is typically the subject of a sentence and whom is an object that follows a preposition such as to, with, for, or about. “Who is going to the prom with you, and with whom did she go last year?”) Many writers use like as a conjunction (She walks like she’s got a train to catch), even though most grammarians insist it be used only as a preposition (It looks like a luxury car, and it rides like a dream). And almost everybody gets confused about lay and lie. (And with good reason. Lay means to put something down, and lie means to recline, but the past tense of lie is, would you believe, lay.)

Another tricky distinction to remember is between was and were. Use was when you’re talking about a fact or possible fact: “If he was afraid, I couldn’t tell” (I don’t know if he was afraid or not) and were when there is no possibility of fact (Beyoncé sings “If I Were a Boy” because she is not a boy).

The difference between that and which is another frequent source of confusion. That is used to introduce a restrictive clause. A restrictive clause “restricts” the meaning of your noun and can’t be removed from the sentence without subtracting some of its sense. “I love the book that Alex gave me” restricts us to, or identifies, the specific book: the one Alex gave me. A nonrestrictive clause is a piece of extra information introduced by which. For example, “I love the book, which Alex gave me” assumes you know which book we’re talking about but adds the detail that it came from Alex. You’ll usually see a comma prior to a nonrestrictive clause.

This distinction is a good general rule of thumb, but it’s so common to see which used with a restrictive clause (“Students protested the rule which prohibits gum chewing”) that you’ll never get dinged for it.

Minor mistakes like these might confuse, disturb, or disgust your reader, depending on which mistakes you make, how often you make them, and who the reader is. It’s arbitrary. When I wear an editor’s hat, I don’t mind a writer using who instead of whom, or occasionally using like as a conjunction. On the other hand, I would be inclined to reject the writer who consistently used like as a conjunction (even though Shakespeare did it) or who wrote, “I lied down for a nap.”

When it comes to minor grammatical mistakes, readers don’t all draw lines at the same place. But all readers have a limited number of grammatical mistakes that they will forgive, so you should at least aim for grammatical perfection except when you can improve the writing by breaking a rule of grammar.

Many grammatical errors occur because the writer tries too hard not to make a mistake. Instead of trusting his or her ear for language, the writer reacts to some traumatic correction in childhood. Most of us, for example, once said, “Jimmy and me are going to the movies,” and had some impolite adult snap at us, “It’s ’Jimmy and I are going to the movies.’” Many people were corrected so often that they now change all their me’s to I’s and write things like “The contract was given to Jimmy and I.” (It should be “Jimmy and me.” I is nominative, me is objective.) Or, having been bawled out for saying, “I played bad,” when he should have said, “I played badly,” the kid turns into an adult who writes things like “I feel badly about your loss,” when he means that he feels bad about your loss. The problem is that the writer recalls the specific words involved instead of the pertinent rule, which was not explained.