by Roger Weir, student affairs
If you give a man paper, a pencil and a means of distribution, it won't be long before he feels the need to be instructive. It's been about two months, in my case. (If you give paper and pencil to a woman, she'll probably use it first to add this to her list of men's needs that annoy the daylights out of women.) As for me, I have an entirely selfish motive underlying my magnanimous willingness to enlighten everyone (else). It's to improve working conditions on my part-time job as adjunct proofreader.
My plan is to encourage those of you who continue to make the same old mistakes, week after week, to move on to more exotic errors that will spice up the proofreader's dreary task in creative ways. I even have examples that you can use for inspiration. Some of you may remember the flyer posted across the campus some years ago, hand-written by a faculty member, inviting the College community to a meeting to discuss "Pubic Safety." I seem to recall that attendance required the meeting to be moved from the Blue Room to Special Olympics Stadium, but perhaps memory is toying with me. Or consider our under
graduate catalog for l989-91, which claimed that Spanish 212 would "help students increase their ability to understand, speak, read and write Italian." More recently, I received a job inquiry from a woman whose résumé said that she had graduated from Buffalo State magnum cum laude. Took her degree at gunpoint, I can only presume. Now those are errors that make proofreading essentially a rather low-level skill excelled at by slow readers with a need to find fault with total strangers worth doing. You can match these, even improve upon them, if you would only stop wasting time on others like the following:
You know how often the words freshman and freshmen show up in print on any college campus, but you probably can't guess how often they show up wrong. And not just from composition classes, but from every place, including every floor of Allen (even gasp! the seventh), FOB, and the Rakov Center. And don't look sideways at your secretary, either it shows up just as often from faculty and professional staff. It's almost always the same error using freshmen for the adjective, as in freshmen orientation, freshmen class,
freshmen residence halls. Maybe the writer makes it plural because there is more than one freshman being oriented, tested, and housed. Wrong. When in doubt, just try the phrase with some other class, and see how it looks and sounds: Seniors orientation? Seniors class? Nahhh. I know, I know; it's a piddling little complaint. But golly, the public expects Ford to spell Mustang correctly, and they probably expect at least as much from SUNY Brockport when it comes to freshman/freshmen.
The hyphen is another major challenge, which becomes apparent whenever we get into the location of things relative to the College. A student may live on campus, but she lives in on-campus housing. You use a thank-you note to say thank you to someone, not thank-you. In situations like these, the hyphen is supposed to tell the reader you're using the two words together to describe the next one (which makes the hyphenated word a compound modifier). This minor error isn't like the infamous split infinitive rule, now deceased, which was silly to start with, and never clarified anything anyway. This one actually reduces confusion. Long-lost
dog? Any canine missing for a long while. Long lost dog? Dachshund, missing for an unspecified period of time. Many of these words start life as two but end up as one, usually after a few decades of being chaperoned by a hyphen (on going, on-going, ongoing; or fund raising, which is headed that way, and is now seen as both fund-raising and fundraising). But don't get pro-active, as we say in the student personnel biz, or the Proof Police will make little red marks all over your work.
Confused about the distinctions between ensure, assure, and insure? Well, sure. You ensure (make certain) that the residence halls are ready for occupancy by the opening of school each semester, you assure (give confidence to) parents and students that this is the case, and if you're really smart you insure the halls against not being open (take out an insurance policy that pays off if they aren't). Do most people follow this rule? Nope, and nobody is apt to snigger if you don't either. But you will impress the language experts, and it won't cost you much of anything.
While we're at it, let's polish off its versus it's. This one defeats a lot of people, including a few who write for a living. Once, while waiting for our coffeemaker to finish its work, I read the blurb on a can of Maves Coffee, describing how clever I was to have purchased it. (I sent the can to my boss as support for my DSI self-nomination. She said it was grounds all right, but that there weren't enough in the world.) The coffee turned out to be a lot better than its advertising department, which used it's wrongly four times out of four - it's aroma, it's flavor, and two more qualities I have since repressed. For those of you who think that possessives formed with an "s" always take an apostrophe, get real! When was there ever a rule about English that you could count on? Don't look for a rule, just read the two words separately and see if it works: You'll love it is aroma? The Senate came to
it is senses? (I see I've digressed into fantasy.) If its works, it must be the possessive, and if it is works, then it must be the contraction. No rules of grammar necessary here, or in any of the others I've included. If it required much knowledge of grammar, this would have been written by someone from the Department of English.
The difference between affect and effect seems to baffle half the writers of English at one time or another, and straightening it out isn't made any easier by the fact that both of them serve as both nouns and verbs. (Surely our language was the creation of some committee.) If you simply haven't the will to sort it all out, nobody could blame you, but if you just settle for using affect as a verb (to have an influence on, cause a change in) and effect as a noun (a result, something brought about by a cause or agent) you'll be right most of the time. How does the
weather affect you? Weather can have a nasty effect. That will get you through about 90 percent of the time. I'm required by law, however, to admit that occasionally effect is a verb (to bring about, to cause to happen), and affect can have an entirely different meaning as a noun, and also has a life as a verb. But, hey! You're the writer, which means you can steer clear of all those complications, and zero in on the main meanings for each of them. If they want you to be an expert in the language in addition to everything else, they can give you a big fat raise, right?
Now for one graduate-level item: the elusive distinction between "that" and "which." If you use them interchangeably you'll have a lot of very educated company, but there are times when choosing the right one really makes things clearer. Ready? "She likes foreign cars, which are economical." Meaning: Foreign cars are economical,
and she likes them. "She likes foreign cars that are economical." Meaning: Some foreign cars are economical and some aren't, and she likes the ones that are. Or: "The lawnmower, which is in the garage, is broken," versus "The lawnmower that is in the garage is broken." In the first instance, the message is that the accursed lawnmower is broken, and it's in the garage. In the second, there is more than one lawnmower, but the one in the garage is broken. Grammarians will tell you that this is a case of the defining clause (that) versus the non-defining (which). You can always tell the non-defining clauses, because you can safely omit them without changing the basic meaning of the sentence. She likes foreign cars. The accursed lawnmower is broken.
Eyes glazing over? Funny, I get the same reaction when I talk to people.
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