I started this post with the intention of publishing it on Grammar Day. Unfortunately I missed my deadline. Regardless I present for you a rant.

You need an editor. If you publish your writing, you need an editor. Let me be crystal clear, when I say “publish” I don’t mean books or magazines, at least not exclusively. I mean: if you put your written words in front of the eyes of other human beings (or intelligent animals) you need to have somebody edit it – and that somebody can be you. I am not asking for the world, your writing does not have to be perfect, but it should be free of glaring errors that make your writing difficult to understand and painful to read.

Typographical Errors (typos)

One of the most common problems in writing is that the writer’s fingers can start to move faster than their brain. This can lead to keys on the keyboard simply being pressed out of order. A few examples from my own writing:

• the becomes teh
• have becomes ahve
• Paris becomes PAris

These kinds of errors can be detected by many different text-editing programs, and in more recent years by web browsers. Firefox, for example, will detect many spelling problems and underline the offending words to draw your attention to them. Please don’t ignore them.

Subject-verb Disagreement

This can be a more difficult problem to track down, particularly if English is not your native language, but it makes a tremendous difference in how your writing is perceived by your audience. Mignon Fogarty once referred to this as “the illness that kills your credibility” and I, for one, agree with her. These kinds of errors can creep into our writing when we don’t take into account the way that words in our sentences interact with one another. In some cases this can stem from a lack of familiarity with the language.

• Dave and Amy is coming over tonight — is should be are, there are two people coming over
• that team are mean during the game — are should be is, the team is being referred to as a single entity
• either Amy or Dave are going to help tutor him — are should be is, the two individuals are treated separately

While these are trivial examples, there are more complex rules and scenarios that are worth reviewing. I learned a couple of things while writings this post. There are some excellent examples of subject-verb disagreement in this post by Richard Nordquist.

Verb Tense Disagreement

The last subject I’d likes to cover is somewhat related to the last one and can be just as difficult to track down, particularly if you are not paying close attention. Verb tense disagreements occur when a sentence contains more than one verb and they appear in different tenses. For example one verb in a past tense, and another in a present or future tense.

• John slurps his soup when he ate — slurps could be slurped or *ate could be eats
• Adam and Jamie make explosions when they were on TV — make could be made or were could be are

This one can occasionally be a bit more tricky to resolve because there are almost always multiple possible solutions. Selecting the correct one for your piece depends on the context, and often the verb tense of the surrounding sentences.

Wrapping up

While this is far from an exhaustive list of crimes that writers (including me, on occasion) perpetuate against the English language, they are some of the most common and often the most distracting. Simply giving your writing a once-over can help to eliminate many of these problems. Even when you are not 100% certain about the rule, many of these errors will simply “sound wrong” if you read them aloud. Correcting them immediately will help make you a better writer and save confusion and stress on the part of your readers.