Common Errors in English Usage
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Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#2I believe this has already been posted to HN several times.
It also appears some of the word links are broken. ie oeuvre
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#3As I am always forced bring up in English grammar threads, without a formal (decidable) grammar or an agreed-upon body of work to signify "common usage," there is no formal way to decide whether any statement is grammatical English.
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#4Maybe a list of common errors in English usage would be more useful if it were a manageable list. How about the 20 most common errors in usage. I'd bet (but surely there are some studies on this) that the following would appear near or close to the top of the list:
it's for its; there for their; alright for all right; 'the reason is because', for 'the reason is that'; dangling modifiers; missing or unclear pronominal antecedents; and subject/verb agreement.
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#5Maybe a list of common errors in English usage would be more useful if it were a manageable list. How about the 20 most common errors in usage. I'd bet (but surely there are some studies on this) that the following would appear near or close to the top of the list: it's for its; there for their; alright for all right; 'the reason is because', for 'the reason is that'; dangling modifiers; missing or unclear pronominal…
Loose vs. lose comes up far too often here.
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#6What a fantastic resource, and what a waste that it's in dead paper form (or even web page form).
An automatic style checker would be far more useful, and I bet with some machine learning you could crank out useful but conservative warnings for every one of these entries.
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#7I just started a github repo to port these to a machine readable format
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#8I thought this looked familiar. Then I realized it's because I've submitted it before ;-)
Original link: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1502209
Quite illustrative that links do indeed tend to fall off the newest page too soon. When posted 83 days ago, it got 1 upvote.
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#9I bought the first edition of Bugs In Writing (http://www.amazon.com/BUGS-Writing-Revised-Guide-Debugging/d...) years ago, and have found it an excellent reference.
It's aimed at technical writers and is a beautifully written book. Highly reccomended.
[Edit: I've just been reading the reviews on Amazon, and it seems a few people are put off by the 'cuteness' of the book, feeling it's not professional. The book has a strong personality (if a book can have such a thing) and lots of cat references/pics, so if you're likely to find that annoying it's not the book for you. Myself, I liked it]
Re: Common Errors in English Usage
#10As I am always forced bring up in English grammar threads, without a formal (decidable) grammar or an agreed-upon body of work to signify "common usage," there is no formal way to decide whether any statement is grammatical English.
You could say the same of pretty much everything. Just because something isn't perfect or provable doesn't mean it can't be useful. Just look at this as a guide to English grammar at the date it was written.