Incident—an event, especially if it’s remarkable in some way. This word takes a perfectly ordinary plural: “incidents.” Do not burden your listener (or reader) with the Latinized and incorrect “incidences.”

Process—another one the boss lies to Latinize. The plural is perfectly ordinary: processes (‘pra-sess-uz), not procesese, or procesees (pra-sess-’eeze), or however you spell it.

Phenomena— This is the plural! The singular is “phenomenon.”

Data—neither a robot nor a singular. The singular is datum. This distinction is disappearing, and you see it mainly in scientific literature, but figure on maintaining the distinction in any context where you need to refer to a single datum.

Some words tell you whether to use the singular or plural. “Every,” for example, always refers to a singular. I found this one in the wild: “…has crossed every t’s and dotted every i’s…” I leave the fixing of that one as an exercise for the reader.

Got any pet peeve plurals of your own? Do the curmudgeonly thing and comment.

P.S. The title of this post is an expression used in purchasing departments, referring to the purchase of small numbers of items rather than large lots.

When you have two of something, they should be of the same grammatical type. We call this parallelism.

Here’s an example of how not to do it. The sentence below has three pairs, and one of them is wrong. Can you spot all three and identify the wrong one?

“Injuries and illness bring pain and suffering, as well as causing economic loss to the company.”

…

Got it? The two pairs of nouns are easy to spot. Injuries and illness, pain and suffering. We also have a pair of verbs, but one is an indicative (bring), and the other is a present participle (causing)! The horror! Writers miss this because they want to sound sophisticated by not using plain old “and,” but but the big, long, cumbersome, usually unnecessary “as well as.” Put “and” in there and suddenly “causing” is obviously wrong. It should be “cause.” Now the two verbs are parallel.  Here’s the improved sentence, nice and clean:

“Injuries and illness bring pain and suffering, and cause economic loss to the company.”

Don’t injure your writing by messing up your parallelism. Got any examples of your own? Share in the comments.

The test for redundancy is to remove one of the candidates. Does the meaning change? If no, then you have a redundancy. Redundancies are easy to miss because you have to be paying attention to what you are saying to catch them. Many redundancies are idiomatic, and since we’re used to them, we tend to slide over them without close attention.

Here’s an easy one: “Let’s do it over again.” —You don’t need both “over” and “again.” Remove either word and you have not only the same meaning, but a cleaner, tighter (technical terms for “more concise”) sentence.

Here’s a hard one. I found it in a construction specification, a very technical document that needs to be a concise as possible so the reader can get to the content with the least effort.

“…uses a ship-lap joint system that allows for expansion and contraction to occur.” I’ll spell out the redundancy below, so look at this sentence yourself first, to see if you can discern the redundancy.

…

Okay, class, time’s up.

Congratulations if you figured out that you can leave out either the “for” or the “to occur.” Go back and read the sentence with each choice left out. See?

Here’s why you have a redundancy. Read slowly—the explanation is a bit technical, but within the realm of basic grammar.

• “Expansion and contraction” stand comfortably as the object of the preposition “for.”
• The phrase “to occur”  is an infinitive, which can take a subject, as it does in this sentence. Its subject is  “expansion and contraction.”

So this sentence uses “expansion and contraction” as two things at once. Big no-no. (oops.)

(Delete the infinitive. “To occur” a way of saying “to be.” As a general rule, any time you leave out any form of “to be” from your writing, you produce better writing.)

Aside: I am the proud owner of a pocket knife I inherited from my grandfather that has the word “Rajah” inscribed on it, and the closing quote is not an upside-down version of the opening quotes. It’s a mirror image, which is how they ought to be. That convention died out a long time ago when typographers eliminated a bin of punctuation marks by turning the opening marks over. Since they were doing it all by hand, I suppose I can’t blame them, but I still like mirror-image marks.

By convention nowadays, we use the curly quotes for quotation marks, and the straight quotes as an abbreviation for feet and inches. This is a useful distinction, but how do you get your word processor to make the straight ones when you need them?

Here’s something I just discovered:

In the latest version of MS Word, version 2007, you can get straight quotes by typing the quote key, then pressing the backspace key. The curly changes to straight. Slick; only one extra keystroke.

Have you discovered a handy shortcut for something you do when you write? Share!

Here are a few aphorisms (fancy word for old saw) that lots of people get wrong:

• Money is the root of all evil—Sorry, it’s LOVE of money etc. Go look at I Timothy 6:10
• God moves in mysterious ways His wonders to perform—part of a hymn by William Cowper. Closest similar thought in the Bible would be Hebrews 1:1, maybe Isaiah 55:8f  (f is an abbreviation in verse references and elsewhere for “single (verse) following.” ff means “more than one (verse) following.”
• God helps those who help themselves—Poor Richard’s Almanack.
• Cleanliness is next to godliness—Ben Franklin again. Cleanliness is part of godliness. See Leviticus 10:10 and lots of other places.
• Do unto others what you would have others do unto you—Right idea, but stated backwards. Matthew 17:12 says. “… all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them…”
• To thine own self be true—Hamlet. His dad is giving him advice as Hamlet heads off to college. It’s a good list of advice.
• All things come to him that waits—Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn, first story (the student’s tale)

I could go on. What are your favorite Bible misquotes? Tell us in the comments, and be sure to give the correct citation. Today’s topic was stimulated by today’s Dilbert.

Loan—a noun. The loan is what you might or might not be repaid after you lend it to someone.

Do your lending carefully, and try to keep your loans affordable, in case they don’t pay back what you loaned them.

Everybody knows what a hyphen is. You use it for compounds (see the two preceding posts), and to divide a word at the end of a line if it doesn’t fit. And a few other minor places, such as in telephone and social security numbers. You get a hyphen by pressing the key just to the left of the equals sign on your keyboard. You get an identical symbol by pressing the minus key on the numeric keypad. Technically the minus sign and hyphen are different—the  code sent by the keyboard to the computer is different for the two keys, and some fancy-dancy typesetting systems (Tex and BookMaster come to mind) distinguish between them. That’s probably more than you need to be told about hyphens.

N-dash. An N-dash is a little longer than a hyphen. Use it when you describe a range of values, such as when a store is open: 7–9. To get an N-dash: hold the Alt key down while you type 0150 on the numeric keypad, then release the Alt key. Use an N-dash, and you class up your document, and your readers won’t even know what hit them.

M-dash. An M-dash is a little longer than an N-dash. Use an M-dash to show a break in thought. In the olden days you got the equivalent of an M-dash by typing two hyphens in a row, but you can get a real M-dash with the Alt-key trick, only you type 0151 instead of 0150. Use of M-dashes is a handy indicator of sophistication in typography, and they make your writing easier to understand.

Here’s a hyphen, an N-dash, and an M-dash: -, –, —. Easy to tell the difference, eh? (I’m feeling Canadian right now.)

All this discussion leads to a gaffe in a recent headline in an article published by Ziff-Davis, of all people, that beautifully demonstrates the importance of using the correct punctuation mark. Here’s the headline:

Google Voice-Free Calling Has Arrived

Now, doesn’t that look like some way to make a call without using your voice? Read the article, however, and you discover that Google Voice is a way to make a call for free—a much different meaning, and one that certainly makes more sense. They should have written “Google Voice—Free Calling Has Arrived.”

If you want people to understand you, remember that a hyphen ties things together, an M-dash separates them.

Care to quibble or add to these short lists of what each mark does? Comment. Want to learn more about writing clearly? Get the free document on the right.

When you have a phrase that’s used as an adjective, you hyphenate it. That way you know the first word in the phrase isn’t modifying the second word, but the words together are modifying the noun.

Here’s the example. They get it right the second time, one paragraph later, so I suspect careless proofreading.

“…we have a much better idea of how to find and recognize Earth like planets (Emphasis mine. This should be hyphenated.) outside our solar system…” said Enric Palle, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias.

“Many discoveries of Earth-size planets (correct!) are expected in the next decades and some will orbit in the habitable zone of their parent stars.”

Side note: I see they capitalize “Earth.” A century back, when I was in sixth grade, Mrs. Clemens taught us to capitalize all the planet names except earth.

Don’t get me wrong—I read their articles regularly and find them interesting and informative. But carelessness like this frosts me. If they had read and followed the little freebie I offer (see the form on the right) perhaps they would have been more careful. I recommend you take a look at it.

Hyphenate adjective phrases. You can have set-up instructions, a step-by-step plan, a last-minute trip, living-room furniture, and out-of-the-box thinking. All these phrases are adjectives. They describe nouns (technically the word should be the more generic term “substantives,” not “nouns.” “Thinking” isn’t a noun, it’s a gerund.)

Do not hyphenate phrasal verbs or prepositional phrases. You sign up for a trip, set up a process, hook up a connection, sign in to your account. You can put down the box,  and you can pull over to the side of the road (verbs), you plan step by step, go on a trip at the last minute, keep it under your hat, and you think out of the box (prepositional phrases).

Some phrases are used as nouns. “That was a nasty put-down.”

One type of exception to these hyphenations: Some phrases have become so common they have turned into compound words. You have a pickup truck, a login ID, and a nice setup.

Can you think up some better examples? Put your own thought-of phrases in the comments.

I own a couple domains, registered in several places, and moved them all to 1and1.com so I’d have the same registrar for them all, and need to go to only one place. I think the culprit in the delay was GoDaddy, whom I don’t particularly recommend, and of whom I have several times heard my colleagues speak disparagingly. I like 1and1’s interface and outstanding customer support. I happen to like HostGator for a hosting service, so all my domains are hosted there, and I have an account with them that enables me to have my own domain name server. Everything is nice and organized, as documentation should be.

Look for a resumption of my grammatical witticisms on Twitter. Follow me here: rogersgeorge

Meanwhile, here’s a little glossary of some of the technical terms I used in that big paragraph. Instead of alphabetical, I’ll put them in logical order.

• url—internet address. Not the site you see when you type in a url. Also called a domain name.
• domain name—Technically, the url is a string of numbers interspersed with periods, and the domain name is the meaningful string of letters that you see, typically ending with something like .com or .net or .org.  Domain name and url are used interchangeably.
• registrar—the place (company) that makes your url exist. They register it with the organization that manages the structure of the internet. You pay them typically less than $10 per year to have your url. Changing registrars is discouraged, and somewhat awkward to do. I started out with a fair amount of ignorance, so I registered domains in several places, making it easy for me to lose track of what I was doing. So I bit the bullet and moved everything to one place. 1and1 is a highly respected registrar. GoDaddy is a highly advertized one.
• hosting—where the web site is. Companies that do registration will also be happy to host your site. Think of it this way: Once you have the address, you probably want to put a house there. Hosting is fairly easy to change, especially if you haven’t built the site yet. Hosting normally costs as little as maybe $7 or $8 per month, but you can pay a lot more, depending on what you want or need.
• site—or web site, or website. A bunch of computer code (especially html) that a browser can read and present to you on your computer. You can see this code if you click on, say, this site, and choose View Page Source from the pop-up menu.
• DNS—or domain name server. The DNS is what connects your site to your url. Your host tells you the name of your DNS. You go to your registrar and assign your DNS to your url. If you host your sited where you have it registered, you don’t have to do this—the registrar assigns their own domain name servers to your url, and you’re all fixed up.
• down—when your site can’t be seen. Usually somebody else’s fault.

This system isn’t so hard to follow when you get used to it, and probably a lot of you reading this already know how these things work better than I do. I’m a beginner. But I invite you to add to this too-brief glossary, make corrections, or ask questions.  Use the comment link.

This seems to be the mistake du jour:

Peek—to look at something, especially in a secretive manner. A Staples ad in my inbox has it right: They want me to take a sneak peek at their latest ad. I’m not distracted by any bad writing, so I’m free to be curious. Maybe I’ll take a look when I finish this tirade against  people shooting themselves in the foot.

Peak—The top of a mountain, the best of something. I see an email subject at this moment: the guy wants me to peak at some DNA. Its PEEK, folks!

Pique—to arouse, especially interest or curiosity. One doofus recently wanted to peek my interest in his product. Not from an illiterate, thanks.

These are second-grade words (okay, maybe “pique” is ninth grade). Advertise your products, not your ignorance!

Harrumpf.

I hope you have something to say about this. Leave a comment. If you’re motivated to improve your writing, fill in the form on the right to learn some ways to make sure you don’t commit these atrocities.

Almost never.

Look a a few examples. In every case, not only do you not change the meaning when you remove these offending words, but the result is cleaner, faster, tighter, easier. The fewer distractions you give your readers, the better your writing.

“Just put your money in the box.”                           “Put your money in the box.”
“Just turn left when you see the sign.”                     “Turn left when you see the sign.”
“To accept the document, simply click ‘I Accept’ “      “To accept the document, click ‘ I Accept.’ ”
Just simply eliminate these useless words.                Eliminate these useless words.

Simple, isn’t it?

When do you use these words?

• Use “just” to refer to the immediate past. “He just stepped off the plane.”
• Use “simple” to say that something is not complicated, but I can’t think of a simple example for “simply.”

In the next hour you will see a few examples of this misuse out there in the wild. Maybe you’ll find a useful use of “simply.” Come back and share in the comment box (click “Add a comment” below this post). If you want some good general advice about writing, fill in the form on the right.

May—Something has permission. You may show up any time after noon. You may watch TV after you finish your homework. You may not go out with the boys unless you bring me along.

Can—Something is able. Goats can butt. You can wash your hands and still have germs on them. You can watch TV, but it will rot your brain. I know you can fix the washing machine, but how long will it take?

Might—Something is possible. If traffic is heavy, you might be late. You might want to watch TV, but you may not, if you can’t get your work done.

You might find some room for variation, and you may certainly appeal to poetic license, but if you can, you should say exactly what you mean.

Now it’s your turn. Got any bad examples you love to hate? You may post a comment to this post and share it with us. I know you can, and some of you might. Look at the writing techniques on the right.

(Okay, no more bad rhymes.)