10 Classes of Careless Usage

10 Classes of Careless Usage 10 Classes of Careless Usage 10 Classes of Careless Usage By Mark Nichol If you find yourself making any of the following types of errors, general or specific, brush up on your writing with grammar guides and usage handbooks and/or any or all of the other strategies mentioned at the end of this post. 1. Appending an s to words in which, in most usage, the letter should not be included (for example, regards, as in â€Å"in regards to†) or that, in American English, have dropped it altogether (backward). (Using the -st ending in such words as amidst and amongst is a similar sign of poor usage.) 2. Using the incorrect form of pronouns writing, for example, â€Å"My friend and myself† instead of â€Å"My friend and I† or â€Å"That happened to she and I at the same time† rather than â€Å"That happened to her and me at the same time.† (If you don’t like the way that sentence looks, either, write, â€Å"That happened to both of us at the same time.†) 3. Using unnecessarily complicated words or phrases in favor of simpler, well-established terms: utilize instead of use, â€Å"prior to† in place of before, subsequently instead of later. 4. Using nonwords: irregardless, supposably, theirselves. 5. Using plural forms of words instead of singular ones: â€Å"a criteria,† â€Å"a phenomena.† 6. Using less when fewer is appropriate: â€Å"There are less boxes than I thought† instead of â€Å"There are fewer boxes than I thought.† 7. Using euphemisms: â€Å"He passed away last year† instead of â€Å"He died last year.† 8. Using badly in place of bad in such sentences as â€Å"He feels badly about the decision.† 9. Adding extraneous prepositions: â€Å"That’s too small of a shirt for you.† 10. Employing erroneous wording of idiomatic phrases: â€Å"for all intensive purposes† instead of â€Å"for all intents and purposes.† So, how do you know if you’re making such mistakes? Printing this representative list out and tacking it up next to your computer is all well and good for reminding you about these ten pitfalls, but what about the hundreds of others that plague writers? A combination of strategies is called for: Do Your Homework Borrow or buy some of the books listed in the post I linked to in the first paragraph, or check out the resources reviewed on this site. You needn’t read these guides cover to cover; just browse each one to determine whether its content or presentation style is appropriate for you, then, a few pages at a time, work your way through the ones that work for you. Read Role Models Seek out high-quality prose: leading magazines and newspapers and great literature. You don’t have to give up reading your favorite blogs or pulp fiction (some of which is/are very well written), but divide your leisure reading between the exemplary and the acceptable so that you can distinguish between the two and recognize well-constructed prose. Go Back to School Take a writing or editing class, whether offered as part of a university’s regular curriculum or as a continuing-education course. Whether you earned an MA in literature is irrelevant. You probably didn’t focus on the mechanics of writing during your college years, but now it’s time to do so. Ask for Backup Get a friend or a colleague whose writing or editing skills you respect to look over shorter pieces for you and flag grammar and usage errors. (Emphasize that you’d like them to merely call out the problems; you’ll solve them.) This strategy doesn’t work if you’ve completed a novel or a thick report, unless you can pay or trade for services, but when applied to short stories or modest work projects, it will help you develop your skills. Want to improve your English in five minutes a day? Get a subscription and start receiving our writing tips and exercises daily! Keep learning! Browse the Grammar category, check our popular posts, or choose a related post below:75 Synonyms for â€Å"Angry†Precedent vs. Precedence50 Synonyms for "Song"

How Scientists Estimate the Weight of Extinct Dinosaurs

How Scientists Estimate the Weight of Extinct Dinosaurs Imagine that youre a paleontologist examining the fossilized remains of a new genus of dinosaura hadrosaur, say, or a gigantic sauropod. After youve figured out how the specimens bones are put together, and what type of dinosaur youre dealing with, you eventually go on to estimate its weight. One good clue is how long the type fossil is, from the tip of its skull to the end of its tail; another is the estimated or published weight estimates for comparable types of dinosaurs. If youve discovered a huge titanosaur from late Cretaceous South America, for example, you might venture a guess of 80 to 120 tons for a full-grown adult, the approximate weight range of South American behemoths like Argentinosaurus and Futalognkosaurus. Now imagine that youre trying to estimate the weight not of a dinosaur, but of an obese stranger at a cocktail party. Even though youve been around human beings all of your life, of all shapes and sizes, your guess is more likely than not to be inaccurate: you might estimate 200 pounds when the person actually weighs 300 pounds, or vice-versa. (Of course, if youre a medical professional, your guess will be much closer to the mark, but still potentially off by 10 or 20 percent, thanks to the masking effect of the clothing the person is wearing.) Extrapolate this example to the 100-ton titanosaur mentioned above, and you can be off by as many as 10 or 20 tons. If guessing the weight of people is a challenge, how do you pull off this trick for a dinosaur thats been extinct for 100 million years? How Much Did Dinosaurs Really Weigh? As it turns out, recent research demonstrates that experts may have been drastically overestimating the weight of dinosaurs, for decades. Since 1985, paleontologists have used an equation involving various parameters (the total length of the individual specimen, the length of certain bones, etc.) to estimate the weight of all kinds of extinct animals. This equation produces reasonable results for small mammals and reptiles but veers sharply from reality when larger animals are involved. In 2009, a team of researchers applied the equation to still-extant mammals like elephants and hippopotamuses and found that it vastly overestimated their weight. So what does this mean for dinosaurs? At the scale of your typical sauropod, the difference is dramatic: whereas Apatosaurus (the dinosaur previously known as Brontosaurus) was once thought to weigh 40 or 50 tons, the corrected equation puts this plant-eater at a mere 15 to 25 tons (though, of course, it doesnt have any effect on its enormous length). Sauropods and titanosaurs, it seems, were much more slender than scientists have given them credit for, and the same probably applies to plus-sized duckbills like Shantungosaurus and horned, frilled dinosaurs like Triceratops. Sometimes, though, weight estimates veer off the tracks in the other direction. Recently, paleontologists examining the growth history of Tyrannosaurus Rex, by examining various fossil specimens at various growth stages, concluded that this fierce predator grew much more quickly than was previously believed, putting on as many as two tons per year during its teenaged spurt. Since we know female tyrannosaurs were bigger than males, this means that a full-grown T. Rex female may have weighed as much as 10 tons, two or three tons heftier than previous estimates. The More Dinosaurs Weigh, the Better Of course, part of the reason researchers impute enormous weights to dinosaurs (though they may not admit to it) is that these estimates give their findings more heft with the general public. When youre talking in terms of tons, rather than pounds, its easy to get carried away and carelessly attribute a weight of 100 tons to a newly discovered titanosaur, since 100 is such a nice, round, newspaper-friendly number. Even if a paleontologist is careful to tone down his weight estimates, the press is likely to exaggerate them, touting a given sauropod as the biggest ever when in fact it wasnt even close. People want their dinosaurs to be really, really big! The fact is, theres still a lot we dont know about how much dinosaurs weighed. The answer depends not only on measures of bone growth, but on other still-unresolved questions, such as what type of metabolism a given dinosaur possessed (weight estimates can be very different for warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals), what kind of climate it lived in, and what it ate on a daily basis. The bottom line is, you should take the weight estimate of any dinosaur with a big grain of Jurassic saltotherwise, youll be sorely disappointed when future research results in a slimmed-down Diplodocus.