10 Things to Remember About Writing Correct English

By Dan Santow

Making the same teeny-tiny errors over and over and over and over again is a huge waste of time (for you, your editor and, if it gets that far, your reader). Here are 10 things to learn, learn well, and never forget:

1. "ly" words do not take hyphens, so you are not a “highly-evolved person” but a “highly evolved person”
2. in the same way that my friend Bruce always says, “Dan, you’re you and I’m me,” commas are commas and dashes are dashes. For reasons that elude me entirely, people want to use dashes in place of the last comma in a series, as in “Irish setters, English bulldogs – and French poodles.” (Seriously, what’s that about?)
3. single entities (the names of companies, for instance) are single entities and are therefore referred to as “it,” not “they,” as in “On Thursday, Chrysler said that it planned to eliminate up to 11,000 more jobs.”
4. “its” – sans apostrophe – is the possessive of the word “it,” while “it’s” – apostrophe in situ – is the contraction of “it is”
5. except in charts and graphs, spell out the word “percent” and always use numerals, even when below 10; so it’s "4 percent," not "four percent" or "4%" or, heaven help me, "four %"
6. prefixes themselves aren’t words, so when adding a prefix to a word you do not need to also add a hyphen unless the resulting word would confuse your readers; it’s "unheard," not "un-heard," "nonresistant," not "non-resistant," etc., but "pro-choice," for instance, and when mailing something a second time, "re-sent," instead of "resent," which means something else altogether
7. don’t use a slash in place of the perfectly reasonable word “and”
8. "i.e." means “in other words” and "e.g." means “for example” and both are always followed by a comma
9. use a comma before “such as” and “including” when the words that follow are an aside (in other words, not necessary to the meaning of the sentence), as in “Arabella chose to take jewelry, including a fancy yellow European cut diamond and emerald ring, a pair of citrine and diamond earrings, and an antique diamond tiara from the collection of HRH Princess Maria Gabrielle of Savoia.”
10. know when to use “that” and when to use “which”: Imagine “by the way” following every “which.” "The 2008 campaign season, which [by the way] started too early, will be over Nov. 4, 2008." The “which” phrase adds a useful, but not necessary, piece of information. So, if “by the way” makes sense, use “which.” Remember, “commas, which cut out the fat, go with which, never with that!” (I didn’t make that up; wish I had.)