Please lend me your red color pen…
By The Grumpy Writer
Tags: Editing, redundant expresions, spellcheck
Category: Editing, Uncategorized
Please lend me your red color pen. . . .
I was at the vegetable market one day and I was looking for some garlic. I couldn’t find any. I tried asking the shopkeepers, but they did not know the word “garlic.” Then, I saw a basket of shallots, which are commonly used in sambar here. I picked one up and showed it to the shopkeepers and said, “Like this, but small and white.” Again, they look at me totally confused. Then I remembered, “Oh, I’m in India.”
“Small in size. White in color,” I tried again.
“Oh! Yes, of course,” they said and quickly found me a big basket of garlic.
In speaking, we often find such redundancy, but in writing, one should carefully avoid such phrases. An extension of this is the use of phrases such as “the reason is because…”, “we were completely surrounded…”, “it was an unexpected surprise…”, “unless and until…”, and “enjoy Mr Grumpy’s free gift!”
. . . sew eye can correct this paper.
Such mistakes can be removed from your writing during a careful editing session. But, it seems like people are getting lazier every day.
Take, for example, spelling. The following is something that, unfortunately, I have become accustomed to seeing in my students’ assignments:
We must mansion that the ultimate massage for the forming community is that they must fallow these techniques.
Your word processor doesn’t know the difference between “mention” and “mansion”; “farming” and “forming”; or “follow” and “fallow”; but I hope that you do!
The biggest problem comes when you find that you are making these mistakes chronically. However, being observant of your own writing can easily change this from being a big problem to being one of your smallest problems. You can add it to your personal writing stylesheets (see Grump #004) to help yourself remember to include it as part of your editing process.
5 Responses to “Please lend me your red color pen…”
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Oh, and of course, your computer can’t tell the difference between “message” and “massage” and let’s hope that we are not talking about a “diary forming” community….
Oh, and if you thought that I was making this stuff up, check out this photo I took in the Academy’s computer lab. Just remember, “Plz Keep your sleepers out side the computer lab.”
Lol! Plz stop paeing attension to such thingz other wize you well and up wasting a lot of your time in such things!!!!!!! here at the Acadmy.
1. ???? (Does it make the reader extra inquisitive????)
2. !!!!!!! (It perhaps fills the reader with superfluous enthusiasm!!!!!)
3. Is there any difference in the use of the verbs of deliberate actions (e.g. to listen) and non-deliberate actions (e.g. to hear) ????
4. What’s big as far as ODF is concerned? – I think the phrase “as far as…..is concerned” can be shortened as “afa….ic” to save time, because people even use it more than 20 times in a single presentation.
Ananda,
This information will minimize my spell check problem. Thanks for these suggestion to improve english.
I’m glad to help.
Of course, the use of “these” would mean that you should have written “suggestions” and english should be written with a capital “E” since it is a proper noun….