The Most Common Spelling Errors Writing (part 2)

The Most Common Spelling Errors Writing

I had a lot of good requests for the first part of this series so here you go with part 2:

Misprint, or typos, is a mistake made in writing that causes either from not concentrating enough or lack of knowledge in English. In this article, I will talk about the most common ones, and present some useful information to avoid making them again. Some of the mistakes are related to grammatical knowledge, so writers should take grammar seriously when writing. The others are vocabulary knowledge, so writers should take it even more seriously. When writing, keep in mind that your sentences must be grammatically correct. This is not to say that you ought to use all the tenses and so on, but you must use adjectives/adverbs correctly, otherwise your articles will not mean what you want, or will be misunderstood. So you should avoid making spelling mistakes.

1)      Advice/ Advise

When using these words, writer should notice that one of them, “advice” is a noun, and the other “advise” is a verb. When wrongly used, it creates confusion while reading. The pronunciation of these two are very similar, but they are different words. A sentence like “You need advise.”, for example, is a grammatical error because here, writer means either that the reader needs “advice”, or the reader needs “to advise”.

2)      Congratulations

This is the word nearly everybody who is a Turkish speaker makes mistakes while writing and reading. Coming from the verb “congratulate”, this is a noun. When learning new words, writers should always look at the other forms of the word, like if they learn a noun, they should look at the verb form of it. And knowing that “congratulations” comes from “congratulate”, will prevent their chance of making mistakes.

3)      Fastly/ Hardly

In English, normally adjectives get the suffix “-ly” and turn into adverbs. But this does not always happen. Some adjectives are irregular, like “good”, is an adjective, and the adverb form is “well”. And sometimes adjective and adverb forms are the same, in the case of “fast” and “hard”. If the writer speaks about somebody driving fast, they should not use “fastly” as an adverb because there is no such word. The same applies for somebody studying hard. Adverbs such as “fastly” and “hardly” does not exist.

4)      Effect/ Affect

This is the same kind of mistake as the one about “advice” and “advise”, one of the words(effect) is a noun and the other one(affect) is a verb. Misusing these words creates a confusion of meaning in the article. For example a sentence like “The new player made a great affect in the team”, is wrong because “affect” is a verb. The correct one should be: “The new player made great effect in the team”. Like this, another mistake could be like “The death of his mother effected him greatly.”, this sentence is wrong again because effect is a noun, correct one should be: “The death of his mother affected him greatly”.

5)      Plural form of the words coming from Latin/Greek.

This is maybe the most common kind of making mistakes. In English, adding “-s” to nouns generally make the noun plural, but irregular nouns change or sometimes they stay the same when having plural forms. Plural forms of the words which come from Greek or Latin, the singular and plural forms are different from each other. Words like “phenomenon”(Greek), “crisis” (Greek), “formula”(Latin), and “medium”(Latin). The plural forms of these four are “phenomena”, “crises”, “formulae” and “media”. Writers should be really careful when using these words because it is very easy and common to make mistakes while using these words. An article about the media organizations we may see a sentence like: “The media is biased.”, and it is totally wrong. The media is not one, so the correct one should be: “The media are biased.” The same applies for other words, too: a sentence like “Formulas used in physics are not so complicated”, needs maybe less correcting, but it needs correcting. It should be like “Formulae(‘Formulas’ is also possible) used in physics are not very complicated.”.

These are some of the most common mistakes in writing. To make less mistakes, writers should always read their articles again and again, because reading the articles again helps writers to see their mistakes, and help them be better writers.