Why You're Wrong

Why You're Wrong Unsolicited advice on grammar and writing Only when the writer is dead, so famous as to be beyond harm, or asking for it have I named names.

This page uses quotations from newspapers, magazines, books, and ordinary written communication to showcase common errors in American English. I have added explanations and, I trust, helpful advice to each example; I aim to provide the readers more than just the momentary satisfaction of feeling superior. I've identified the source of each quotation in vague terms (although some quotations may be

recognizable to readers of certain well-perused periodicals). In many cases, the authors cited have had copy editors who somehow seem to have failed them. As a professional copy editor myself, I know very well that no one catches every error (though some catch 99.99%), so I cast no aspersions. Besides, in any publication worth its salt, there are several stages of reading, multiple opportunities to correct problems, plenty of blame to spread around. No error belongs to only one person. That said, this page is not a publication worth its salt, and any error here is solely my responsibility.

09/20/2024

"George Clooney and Brad Pitt play underworld fixers — the people you call to make criminal evidence disappear — who begrudgingly team up for a job."

02/23/2022

"Though he shares a family name with a Confederate officer hanged for war crimes, Heinrich L. Wirz, 86, did not grow up among Confederate enthusiasts. He was born in Bern, Switzerland — not far from the postcard-ready Münster cathedral, begun in 1461, centuries before Fort Sumter, let alone Appomattox."

01/27/2022

"Republicans cast Biden pick, whomever it will be, as radical"

10/01/2021

"After President Donald Trump's 2018 State of the Union address, first lady Melania Trump leaves the Capitol on the arm of a military aide whom Stephanie Grisham said was chosen to embarrass the president after reports that Trump had had an affair with a p**n star."

09/29/2021

”The very existence of these false allegations of rigged and stolen elections erode trust in the democratic process and are also likely to become the norm going forward, he added, because of a growing ’cottage industry of election delegitimization and pre-delegitimization.‘”

05/01/2021

"By the time the study was stopped, at least 100 of the men had died of syphilis or related complications, 40 wives had been infected and 19 children had been born with the disease. In 1997 President Bill Clinton hosted five of the eight men still living and apologized for the 'clearly racist' program: 'What the United States did was shameful, and I am sorry.' The last of the men in the study died in 2004.

"Despite the apology, the Tuskegee study has become a stand-in for the broader history of mistreatment and neglect that communities of color have experienced from the medical system, says..."

03/19/2021

"First, he cautioned that just because people have smoked a few times in the past doesn’t necessarily disqualify them from a security clearance. But casual, semi-regular use can."

02/22/2021

"Now 85, Woody Allen and his wife, Soon-Yi Previn, did not respond to the filmmakers."

01/25/2021

"Edith Wharton (Jan 24, 1862 – Aug 11, 1937) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in Literature for her novel The Age of Innocence."

01/22/2021

"Rarely has a nation needed the renewal that is promised with every inauguration. The absence of the president, who became the first in more than a century not to attend his successor’s swearing-in, along with the tableau and pageantry on a socially distanced West Front of the Capitol, signaled an eagerness on the part of many, though not all, to move past the Trump years."

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