We Regret the Error, Jayme Hagen

Writing, like any sport or musical instrument is something which has to be honed and practiced to be perfected. Craig Silverman states this when he says,"Mistakes are bad, but also instructive." The way a writer gets better is to learn from the mistakes made in previous writing. Since there is no one correct way to write a sentence, Silverman says, "you can't learn accuracy the way you learn to add and subtract." It is only by constantly fact-checking and proofreading your work that you are able to ensure your writing is as free from errors as possible. This is arguably the most effective way to improve your grammar in your work. There are many ways one can become a more efficient proofreader including:

• Re-reading your work.
• Using a spelling and grammar checker, though these are not 100 per cent effective, these are just another tool at your disposal.
• Reading your article backwards to make sure that all of your verbs are in the right tense.

There are certain words which are acceptable to use, but whose use is frowned upon by many in the writing community. An example would be the word impact, which can be used as a verb with an object or without an object. Many people still disapprove of its use as a transitive verb, but this is likely to become more acceptable in the future.

Even major publications are not able to catch errors 100 per cent of the time and because of this, many of these websites have an errors section where they address all the errors that have been published. These can be corrections of the actual information being incorrect, such as Jayson Blair's story of deception, or simple grammatical errors.

Here are some examples of errors found on the Edmonton Journal's website:

• An article ran which began with the sentence: "NHL general managers begin a three-day meeting today to decide how to crack down on head shots, which is good news, a laudable, promised followup to a December session at which some encouraging, enlightened words were uttered on this critical subject." This is a run-on sentence that should not have remained one sentence, it loses its reader. It could be solved with a period after "which is good news."
• In another article, a man accidentally gets himself wet with a benjo and describes it as now being able to "ponder his dilemma." The word dilemma can only be used when there are two undesirable outcomes to a situation and there it is impossible to choose the right answer. Staying in a bathroom forever, or being seen with a slightly wet pair of pants is hardly an undecidable outcome, therefore it is not a dilemma.
• In one article, a family is trying to buy a home but unable to because of the current state of realty, they keep getting outbid. The article has the sentence, "They fell in love with the house and "our hearts got broken" when they didn't get it." It goes from they, to our back to they, and as a result makes no sense. To fix this they should have just omit 'our' from the quote and used their outside of the quotations.

Picture from Farm3.