Workplace Writing Errors to Avoid

5 Persnickety Grammatical Errors to Avoid in Workplace Communication

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5 Persnickety Grammatical Errors to Avoid in Workplace Communication

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Workplace Writing Errors to Avoid

Table of Contents

Disclaimer: Dan Lovejoy is the grammar snob about whom your mother warned. Dan holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and a Master’s Degree in Technical Communication, but don’t hold that against him.

Every company has one or more grammar snobs who will berate you for any actual or imagined mistakes you make in your emails or work documents. Even if these mistakes rarely cause communication problems, they can have a significant impact if the snob in question is your boss, a client, or a hiring manager. Writing such a series makes me uncomfortable since I am aware that these mistakes only matter because individuals like me claim they do. Worse yet, grammar snobs believe these kinds of errors illuminate some kind of deep character or intellectual flaw. So make sure to avoid them, especially in your job search.

Why do we use the word “error”? A departure from American (or British, or international) Standard English is a mistake. We’ve concluded that everything that deviates from the standard of what English academics, news anchors, and other powerful people know how to write and speak is incorrect. Who has influence and who doesn’t is crucial to the notion of error, along with questions of power and social standing. Therefore, you must learn to speak and write in the language of power if you want to be influential, powerful, and in a position of authority. Standard English is that language, for better or worse.

But there’s another, even better reason to make sure your English is flawless. Have you ever worked your tail off on a document, then sent it around for review, only to get back corrections of misspellings, typos, and apostrophes? One self-appointed grammar snob once wrote me back with a detailed explanation of the reasons we should avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. Did he review the actual content? No, he was too enamored with his own erroneous knowledge of English grammar. Make your English perfect, and reviewers will actually have to comment on the meaning, which is much more difficult than pointing out typos.

In future blog entries, I’ll write about how to make your writing more effective, and about how you can clean up your writing style to make your writing more concise and more elegant. But before you can do that, you have to learn which mistakes pain a grammar snob like a hot poker in the eye. Once you’ve eliminated these errors, you can go on to bigger and better things.

Workplace Writing Errors to Avoid

Pluralization with the apostrophe:
Incorrect:
The farmer fed the pig’s.
Correct: The farmer fed the pigs.

I have to confess that this one makes my eye twitch. People misuse the apostrophe because the apostrophe really doesn’t make any sense for possessives, and it never did. It makes even less sense for plurals, but who can blame us for getting confused? Scholars aren’t certain why the apostrophe came to be used for the possessive, but it is likely a contraction of “his” between the name of the person and the object in possession. In other words, “John his hat” became “John’s hat.” People were perfectly happy to write “Johns hat,” but the grammar snobs decided that there was something missing (the “h-i” in “h-i-s”), thus the apostrophe. If you find a grammar snob wants to argue about this, throw around the words “genitive” and “elision” and you’ll probably scare them off. Just remember, never use an apostrophe to pluralize a noun.

Its versus it’s
Incorrect:
The dog wouldn’t stop licking it’s feet.
Correct: The dog wouldn’t stop licking its feet.

After pluralization with the apostrophe, nothing horrifies the grammar snob more than the misuse of the neuter possessive pronoun, “its.” (Throw that one around the office and impress your coworkers)  Now “its” is possessive, but it doesn’t have an apostrophe! Just remember that “his” and “her” don’t have apostrophes, so neither does “its.”

Comprise
Incorrect: The machine is comprised of three parts.
Correct: The machine comprises three parts.

Just remember that comprise never takes “of.” If you want to use this expression, you can say, “The machine is composed of three parts.” and avoid comprise, because it sounds a bit high falutin’. 

Fewer and less
Incorrect: The express lane at the grocery store is for ten items or less.
Correct: The express lane at the grocery store is for ten items or fewer.

Yep, “less” refers to mass nouns, which are nouns that you can’t count with “one, two, three.” So you can give someone fewer coins, but you can’t give them “fewer money” or “fewer milk.” If you can count it, you should use use “fewer.” So: one item; two items; three items; all those grocery store signs are wrong!

With/In regards to
Incorrect:
I’d like to speak to you with regards to my promotion.
Correct: (but stiff) I’d like to speak to you with regard to my promotion. (Or “regarding my promotion,” or even “as regards my promotion.”

Heavens to Betsy, this is so formal! Unless you’re writing a letter to the President, just use “about” or “with respect to.”

Myself
Incorrect: John, Karen and Bill were in the car with myself. 
Correct: John, Karen, and Bill were in the car with me.

For some reason, ending a sentence with “me” just sounds too informal – somehow incorrect. I blame your eighth grade English teacher. Never use “myself” like this. “Myself” should only be used to talk about doing something to yourself, “I bought myself a present.” or to emphasize your participation in an activity “I gave the presentation myself.” Just remember that in Standard English, you can never precede “myself” with “and.”

These are just a few of the most common grammatical errors I see in business. There are many more. In future blog entries, I’ll write about style, which is a description of word choice and word order. It makes a big difference in the effectiveness of your writing.

Who caught my error?

And here’s a present just for you grammar snobs. I’ve hidden a grammatical error in the text. Can you find it?

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6 Comments

  1. Hi Dan, useful and needed article here.

    I believe the embedded grammatical error is incorrectly capitalizing an example sentence. That is, I don’t believe “The” should be capitalized in this excerpt: If you want to use this expression, you can say, “The machine is composed of three parts.” If you want to provide a complete sentence as the example, I believe the capitalization should be bracketed “[T]”.

    Also, I believe there should be a comma, not a period, after “present” in this excerpt: “Myself” should only be used to talk about doing something to yourself, “I bought myself a present.” or to emphasize your participation in an activity “I gave the presentation myself.”

    But then again, if both are truly errors that would be a spotting of two grammatical errors, earning me the coveted title of top shelf grammar snob.

    Good day, Mick

  2. Nice article, Dan. Good to know I’m not the only grammar snob in the world. Sometimes it feels that way!

    I agree with Mick’s second point, but not his first. I’d only use [T] if I were taking a direct quote from a source, not giving an example. I also found two other things in the article, plus one in your bio. (Is there a prize? Are you going to tell us what you actually planted?)

    1. “Just remember that ‘his’ and ‘her’ don’t have apostrophes, so neither does ‘its.'”
    I think “her” should be “hers.”
    2. The excerpt cited by Mick is also either missing some words or uses the comma incorrectly: “… doing something to yourself, ‘I bought myself a present’. or to emphasize …”

    And from your bio statement: “The opinions here are his own and not his employer.” I believe you might want “employer” to be possessive?

    I did also want to add a story of my own. I used to teach writing, and at one point had corrected so many essays with the word “its” FOLLOWED BY an apostrophe (yes, its’) that I actually looked it up one day just to assure myself that it wasn’t in fact correct and that I hadn’t lost my mind!

    1. Thanks for setting me straight Tunde, and good eye. Trying not to be persnickety, I must nonetheless ask is your use of an ellipses at the beginning of the sentence fragment correct? I’ve always thought use in the middle and end are OK, not at the beginning.

      1. I can’t find a source that says anything about that one way or the other, but I suspect it’s a throwback to my academic days. It’s my instinct, anyway! Will post again if I track it down.

  3. If you find a grammar snob wants to argue about this, throw around the words “genitive” and “elision” and you’ll probably scare him (not them) off.

    Great article. Thanks!

Comments are closed.

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