Once again, BrainPickings.org brings me this interesting read about H.P. Lovecraft's advice to young writers and the most common mistakes they do.
- Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
- Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
- Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
- Ambiguous use of pronouns.
- Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I,” or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
- Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
- Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college,” or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant.”
- Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston,” or “he voiced a protest.”
- Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise,” or “He said the earth was round.”
- The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide.”
- The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
- False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
- Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
- Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,” or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
- The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
- Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me,” “Leave me take this,” “He was obsessed with the idea,” or “He is a meticulous writer.”
- Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena,” or “two stratas of clouds.”
- Use of false or unauthorized words, as burglarize or supremest.
- Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
- Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.
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