Affect and effect are two words that easily get mixed up
AFFECT
Affect is mainly used as a verb. It means have an impact on, have an effect on. The bad weather affected our plans for the evening. The old man was visibly affected by the girl’s kind words. How will the strike affect your job?
Affect can also have the meaning pretend to be or have.
I don’t like how he affects a British accent.
The bad weather affected our plans for the evening
EFFECT
Effect is a noun. It denotesthe result of an action oran impression. The effect of his words was immediate. I liked the sound effects in the film. The law is still in effect.
To sum up, most often affect is a verb and effect is a noun.
That said, you may – on rare occasions – find affect used as a noun. Then it means something that acts on something else, usually in psychological jargon.
And effect can be used as a verb meaning to produce, bring about something new, often in phrases like ”to effect a change”
Have you ever thought about the difference between effective and efficient?
EFFECTIVE
Use effective when you want to say that something gives the result that was intended. Effective tells us whether something has been done, not how it was done. The focus is on the result.
Those pills are really effective – my headache disappeared in less than twenty minutes. The manager’s speech was short but remarkably effective.
Being effective can also mean officially start.
The new regulation is effective from 1 October.
EFFICIENT
Use efficient to say that somebody or something works well without wasting time, money or energy. Efficient tells us how something was achieved. The focus is on the process, on minimising cost or waste.
We are installing a much more efficient cooling system. She is a very efficient salesperson.
To sum up, effective is goal-oriented and focuses on the ability to produce a wanted result; efficient focuses on how little was wasted to produce the result. Or, to quote Peter Drucker, being effective means doing the right things, being efficient means doing things right.
An efficient company will do things at a lower cost (with higher profit), but it must also meet the customers’ requirements by being effective.
The corresponding nouns are effectiveness and efficiency.
If you have seven minutes to spare, here is a video explaining the difference between effective and efficient. And here you can read about affect and effect.
Continual and continuous (and the adverbs continually and continuously) come from the verb continue but there is a difference between them.
CONTINUOUS
Continuous means that something is going on without interruption, non-stop. The continuous humming from the fridge made me crazy. (A continual humming would be worrying: Why does it stop, start again, stop, then start again …?)
CONTINUAL
Continual implies that something often happens with intervals, comes and goes. Being a typical teenager she had continual quarrels with her parents about homecoming rules. (Both she and her parents should be happy that the quarrels were not continuous.)
As with many other word pairs you may find that some writers don’t make a distinction between these two words. As a good English writer you know the difference, of course.
The two words later and latter look similar but there is an important difference that you should know.
LATER
Later modifies a verb, which is why we language nerds call it an adverb. It refers to something happening after a certain time. Let’s go to the cinema and then we can go to the pub later. Their best known product was introduced much later.
Later is also an adjective; it modifies a noun: I prefer his later work, especially the large paintings. Can we discuss this at a later date?
There are a few collocations with later: Sooner or later they will succeed. See you later! Later on in the film, they get married.
LATTER
Latter usually refers to the second of two persons or things. We can talk about the former and the latter. I have listened a lot to I’m Your Man and Tower of Song and I must say I prefer the latter. Would you like red or white wine? – The latter, please.
Latter can also refer to something being nearer the end. The company went global in the latter part of the 1990s. The full name of the Mormon Church is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Writers sometimes do not distinguish between an accent and an apostrophe.
ACCENT
Acute accent
An accent is a diacritic, a sign added to a letter. When you type a diacritic on the keyboard, the cursor does not move on and so the diacritic is added above (or in other cases below, by the side of or even inside) the letter. Examples of other diacritics are the circumflex ( ^ ), the umlaut ( ¨ ) and the tilde ( ~ ).
(Some Swedish words with diacritics have come into the English language, such as ångström, glögg, smörgåsbord and surströmming.)
English has two two accents, the acute accent ( ´ ) and the grave accent ( ` ).
The acute accent in English is used in loanwords such as apéritif, café, cliché, décor, fiancé and fiancée. In some very rare cases an acute accent is added to a loanword that lacks the accent to show that the last vowel of the word is pronounced: The Italian word latte (milk) is sometimes written latté (or lattè) in English. This can be misleading, since it suggests that the stress is on the last syllable, while the Italian word has the stress on the first syllable and has no accent.
The grave accent is rare in English and – like the acute accent – mainly used in foreign words: vis-à-vis, à la carte, ampère, manège, première.
Generally, English writers do not use diacritics even in loanwords – in fact, English keyboards do not have any accent marks. The Swedish words mentioned above are usually written as angstrom, smorgasbord, etc. There are, however, a few words in which the accent marks a difference between an English word and a loanword:
exposé (film or newspaper article revealing shocking facts about somebody) – expose (show, reveal, give experience)
résumé (short text giving the main points) – resume (start doing something again)
rosé (pink wine) – rose (a flower; pink colour)
APOSTROPHE
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark. In English it has several uses:
It marks omission of one or more letters: Don’t be late (Do not)! I’d prefer a smaller one (I would).
It marks the possessive case: Have you seen my brother’s car? There is no apostrophe in his, hers, its, ours, yours and theirs.
In the plural there is no s after the apostrophe: Have you seen my brothers’ cars?
It marks plurals of single letters Mind your p’s and q’s (Mind your manners; be careful about what you say or do).
In plurals of abbreviations and acronyms there is usually no apostrophe: PCs, DVDs, MBAs, URLs, FAQs, UFOs, JPEGs. If there are full stops in an abbreviation, you can include the apostrophe for clarity: Ph.D.’s.
Most style guides leave out the apostrophe in the plural form of decades: They made their first record in the 1960s. You can write an apostrophe before the decade when it is abbreviated: Those born in the ’90s.
The apostrophe represents thousand: 30’ (= 30 000)
The apostrophe is also used as a quotation mark. British English prefers single quotation marks, while American English has double quotation marks ( ” ).
To sum up, you can do very well without the accent in English and only need to worry about the apostrophe. Remember to mind your p’s and q’s; skip the accent and put the apostrophe in the right place!
A dictionary is a list of words and their definitions. A thesaurus (plural thesauri or thesauruses) does not give definitions of words but lists words grouped together according to their meaning.
The first modern thesaurus, published in 1852 by Peter Mark Roget, is still widely used. The book is organised according to ideas or concepts. You first look up a word in the index in the second half of the book, where you will find one or several synonyms for that word, each with a reference number. Under production, for example, in my copy of Roget’s I find the words product, production and dramaturgy. The first two words refer to section 164 and the third to 594 (having to do with drama and ballet). Here you can see a part of section 164 (the numbers before some of the words refer to further sections in the book):
You will notice the richness of expressions here. There are concrete words such as thing, designer and skyscraper and more abstract ones such as attempt, productivity and idea. When you use a thesaurus like this, you need to understand nuances in meaning.
The Longman Language Activator is in a way similar to Roget’s; it is based on concepts. However, it is called a production dictionary instead of a thesaurus – it will help writers produce their ideas. Here is a part of the entry on manager:
Often the word thesaurus is used to denote a dictionary of synonyms or any kind of dictionary.
You can see a comparison between different types of dictionaries here.
A number of students were subjected to various freshman pranks by the lake
You need to understand the difference between amount and number.
There are things we can count and things we cannot count. With countable nouns we use number of and with uncountable nouns amount of. We can talk about the amount of time we work or about the number of hours we work.
A large number of cars had stopped behind the lorry. The number of spectators was impressive. She only drank a small amount of water. I hadn’t expected that amount of work.
We can also use plural forms: He drank vast amounts of beer. Here you will find statistics related to numbers of taxpayers and registered traders.
With amount we say how much of something is present. With number we talk about how many there are.
Notice how the verb form changes:
The number of students has increased every year since 2015. The verb is in the singular because the main subject here is number. The word students could be replaced by another word such as cars, newspapers, attacks, etc.
A number of students have published a campus journal. The verb is in the plural because the main subject is students. A number of can be replaced by, for example, some.
To sum up: The number of … has the singular form of the verb. A number of … has the plural form of the verb.
Both amount and number can also be used as verbs: How much did it amount to? Number the parts from 1–10 according to how you rate their functionality.
American English or British English? Or perhaps Oxford spelling? Does it matter which language you choose? Do your readers care?
Obviously, if you write for an American audience, you should write American English. And if you want to send a paper to a British journal, you should use UK English, which is another name for British English. Always check with the publisher or read the style guide of the journal. However, it is crucial that you are consistent and write your whole text in one and the same language.
When you write a doctoral thesis or a novel, the choice of language is yours. Only, as I said above, be consistent.
If you go for American English, use American spelling and write labor instead of labour, center instead of centre, catalog instead of catalogue, fulfill instead of fulfil, traveling instead of travelling, and so on. Use a z instead of an s in words like recognize and organization. (There are, however, some words that are always written with -ise or -yse – read more about them here.)
American English uses the serial comma, which is the comma that is placed before and or or in a series of words. An example: Horses, cows, and sheep are farm animals. British English does not use this comma (with the exception of Oxford spelling – see further down).
There are also differences in vocabulary. The American apartment is a flat in Britain, Brits walk on the pavement, while Americans use the sidewalk. And when you are angry in Britain, you are mad in America – to a Brit mad means crazy. When something is quite good it is very good in America but only fairly good in Britain.
There are, of course, also differences in grammar. When a British speaker uses the perfect tense, I have already called him, an American would use the past tense, I already called him. The American a real good movie is in British a really good film.
Oxford spelling is a variant of British English. It prefers -ize in words like organize and recognize instead of the spelling -ise in British English. The spelling with -izeis actually the oldest; organize, for example, appeared in a text in England as early as around 1425. The Oxford spelling is used by publishers like Collins, Longman and Oxford University Press (but not Oxford University!) and some academic journals in Britain. The Oxford spelling uses the serial comma, which therefore is also called the Oxford comma.
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