Common_Errors_in_English_usage

week."
Using passive verbs will often trip you up: "In reviewing Gareth's
computer records, hundreds of hours spent playing online games were
identified." This sort of thing looks fine to a lot of people and in
fact is common in professional writing, but technically somebody
specific needs to be mentioned in the sentence as doing the identifying.
Inserting a doer and shifting to the active voice will fix the problem.
While we're at it, let's make clear that Gareth was doing the playing:
"The auditor, in checking Gareth's computer records, identified hundreds
of hours that he had spent playing online games."
Adverbs like "almost," "even," "hardly," "just," "only," and "nearly,"
are especially likely to get stuck in the wrong spot in a sentence.
"Romeo almost kissed Juliet as soon as he met her" means he didn't kiss
her­­he only held her hand. True, but you might want to say something
quite different: "Romeo kissed Juliet almost as soon as he met her." The
placement of the modifier is crucial.
DARING­DO/DERRING­DO
The expression logically should be "feats of daring­do" because that's
just what it means: deeds of extreme daring. But through a chain of
misunderstandings explained in the Oxford English Dictionary, the
standard form evolved with the unusual spelling "derring­do," and
"daring­do" is an error.
DATA/DATUM
There are several words with Latin or Greek roots whose plural forms
ending in A are constantly mistaken for singular ones. See, for
instance, "criteria" and "media." "Datum" is so rare now in English that
people may assume "data" has no singular form. Many American usage
communities, however, use "data" as a singular and some have even gone
so far as to invent "datums" as a new plural. This is a case where you
need to know the patterns of your context. An engineer or scientist used
to writing "the data is" may well find that the editors of a journal or
publishing house insist on changing this phrase to "the data are." Usage
is so evenly split in this case that there is no automatic way of
determining which is right; but writers addressing an international
audience of nonspecialists would probably be safer treating "data" as
plural.
DATELINE/DEADLINE
The word "dateline" is used today mainly to label the bit of text at the
top of a printed news story that indicates where and­­often, but not
always­­when it was written. For instance, after a headline about events
in Kenya, the deadline might read"NAIROBI, Kenya, June 2, 2010."
Probably because this rather obscure word has been popularized by its
use for the name of an NBC television news show, some people confuse it
with "deadline," which is most often the date by which something must be
accomplished. You can miss deadlines, meet deadlines, or have to deal