Errors to avoid

Errors in your writing will brand you as careless, unprofessional, and inconsiderate of your audience. Errors also call into question the credibility of the entire message. Professional writing requires attention to detail and repeated review of your draft to catch all potential errors.

Spelling

Credibility is sacrificed when spelling errors appear in public relations materials. For example, one news release for a company that manufactured a spell-checking pro­gram for a word processor included the non-words "tradmark" and "publishere".

Gobbledygook and Jargon

"Gobbledygook" consists of ponderous words and phrases that obscure simple ideas. For example, to the user of gobbledygook, things don't get "finished", they get "finalized". Events didn't happen "then", they happened "at that point in time". The child isn't "failing" but rather is "motivationally deprived".

"Jargon" consists of words that are known almost exclusively to insiders. Some examples: A "four on the floor" is a four-speed hand-shifted automobile transmission. A "no show" is a person who fails to use a ticket for an event or a trip.

Gobbledygook and jargon are often seen in news releases about high-tech prod­ucts, giving the uninitiated reader a baffling message.

Poor Sentence Structure

The subject and the words that modify it often become separated in a sentence, causing some confusion as to what exactly is being discussed. Here are some examples from actual news releases:

The proposed budget provides salary increases for faculty and staff performing at a satisfactory level of two percent.

The New Mexico Women's Correctional Facility in Grants is scheduling a Christ­mas party for children and grandchildren of inmates under 15.

Wrong Words

A good dictionary serves not only to check spelling but also to verify the meaning of a word.

An Associated Press (AP) story once told about a man who had inherited a small scenic railroad from his "descendants", who had started it in the nineteenth century. The writer meant "ancestors" but used the wrong word. A government publication also used the wrong word when it reported, "Colonel Kit Carson's military campaign result­ed in the interment of 9,000 Navajo and Apache Indians". "Interment" means burial; the writer probably meant to say "internment", which means detention or confinement.

More common mistakes involve the usage of "it's" and "its", "effect" and "affect", "there" and "their", and "presume" and "assume". Other frequently confused words are listed in the next section. When in doubt, take the time to use the dictionary. It will save you embarrassment later.

"Sound-alike" Words

Many words sound alike and are similar in spelling but have very different mean­ings. Although it may be somewhat humorous to read that a survey is "chalk full" of information (instead of "chock-full"), a company's management team is doing some "sole" searching (instead of "soul searching"), or an employee was in a "comma" (in­stead of a "coma") after a car accident, such mistakes are the mark of a careless writer.

A spell-checking program for your personal computer is extremely efficient at catching misspelled words but often can't catch homonyms because they are correctly spelled words. It is therefore important always to proofread your copy even after it has been corrected by a spell-checker program.

Here is a list of words that are frequently confused:

adapt, adopt incredible, incredulous

appraise, apprise negligent, negligible

canvas, canvass peak, peek

comprise, compose pore, pour

continual, continuous principal, principle

ensure, insure rebut, refute

fortunate, fortuitous shoe, shoo

imply, infer stationary, stationery

This list is far from complete. There are many other words that sound alike or almost alike but have different spellings and meanings.