Them Crooked Switcharoos

Friends:

I’ll level with you. English can be a terrible language. I’ve been speaking since I was a wee tyke, but even I don’t know it all that well. Bad for an English graduate student? Maybe. But I challenge someone to claim they know every little stupid nuance the English language has to offer.

Recently I was looking at an old blog of mine I started back when I was in high school. There was only one post: “A Prelude of Things to Come.” In it I introduced myself and explained all of my long-term, starry-eyed goals with the project, somehow hopeful that someone would happen across it and say, “Hey, guy, we’d like to offer you a writing job.”

I never got such a message.

I did get one message: “Your an ass.”

At first, I was indignant. How dare someone I don’t know post on my blog and insult me? The audacity of some anonymous Internet citizen coming to my page and defacing my image disgusted me to the very core.

But I found solace in the fact that the individual made him/herself look like a big ol’ dummy. Instead of saying, “You’re an ass”--the grammatically correct method to call me a name--they voted to say, “Your an ass.” For a moment I tried to wrap my head around the statement, trying to make sense of it by literally reading it the way they typed it. I was unsuccessful.

I’ve seen this same mistake on student’s papers coming into the Writing Center. Many of them are simple typos, but they’re typos that can go overlooked if you’re not looking out for them. I could go an entire paper saying “it’s” instead of “its,” and I might miss it even if I look at it a couple of times. Then I’d look like a big ol’ dummy. I should note: if I see this error on your paper when I’m looking at it, I’m not calling you a big ol’ dummy. I’m just stating that if another person were to see the error, he or she might just think you’re a big ol’ dummy.

But I digress.

Here are some common erroneous switcharoos:

• their, they’re, and there
• to, too, and two
• who’s, whose

They’re switcharoos simply because they’re commonly used words. There are several other usage errors that are more tied to words that are homonyms, or “a word the same as another in sound and spelling but different in meaning, as chase ‘to pursue’ and chase ‘to ornament metal’” (“Homonym”). If one were to write a paper on famous naval battles, his or her instructor might be a bit confused about what combat could erupt between bellybuttons.

“homonym.” Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 23 Jan. 2012. Web.

Word Monster

Why is that word wrong? I didn’t write that? The problem is figuring out what happened.

Ahahahahahahahah.

It’s the Word Monster! Or better known as the dreaded spell check trap.

Because of this Word Monster, proofreading your own paper is even more important. Spell check is helpful, but those squiggly lines that appear under your words or citations don’t necessarily mean they are wrong.

Proofreading is an important part of the writing process because if wrong words appear in sentences, then they can alter the entire meaning of those sentences.

Examples of the Word Monster within your paper can be:

Define and definite

Obtain and abstain

Weather and whether

Affect vs. effect

Corpse vs. corps

Text anxiety vs. test anxiety

Immunity vs. impunity

Test vs. testes

They’re vs. there vs. their

Along with word changes, sometimes Microsoft Word has weird squiggly lines underneath citations. An example would be a citation I turned in for a paper recently: 

Baker, Timothy C. “The (Neuro)- Aesthetics of Caricature: Representations of Reality in Bret Easton Ellis’s Lunar Park.” Poetics Today. Fall 2009. MLA International Biography. Web. 1 September 2011.

Though the citation is right, the Word Monster underlines parts of my citation as if they were wrong, and they are not.

Because of the Word Monster's antics, proofreading is even more important than it was when we had no other option than writing papers by hand and then typing them. 

So watch out for the Word Monster! Proofread your papers before you turn them in and make sure your words are your words, not the Monster’s!