Some errors tend to wind up in the manuscript ready for submission—unless they surface during a professional editing or proofreading pit stop. Here are a few examples of common errors in nonfiction documents that a professional proofreader will not miss if the author has left them in their document.
Incomplete verbs
Incorrect: The land has or will be consolidated.
In this example, the first verb (has) is incomplete. It needs to be followed by the past participle been.
Correct: The land has been or will be consolidated.
Wrong prepositions
Prepositions are a tricky subject, especially when writers whose first language is not English translate an expression from their mother tongue into English.
Take, for instance,
respondents prefer A than B.
To prefer something than something else is incorrect. The correct preposition here is to:
respondents prefer A to B.
Here’s another example of a preposition error:
Most companies are ignorant to the rules they must follow.
Ignorant to is incorrect. The correct preposition here is of:
Most companies are ignorant of the rules they must follow.
Principal instead of principle
Some authors of nonfiction documents don’t know that the words principal and principle have very different meanings. Principal means “most important”, while a principle is “a comprehensive and fundamental law, doctrine, or assumption”.
Imply misused for infer
This is an error especially common in academic writing. Often when someone types,
it can be implied,
they mean
it can be inferred.
To infer means to conclude something based on evidence, which is what a scholar wants to do (most of the time at least) rather than to imply, which means to suggest or to hint.
The the
The is all over the place in nonfiction manuscripts. We’re so used to ignoring it that sometimes the the hides in plain sight. Luckily, a spell-checking tool catches this common error if a human fails to.
Do you need a freelance proofreader for a nonfiction document? Send me a message at editor@languageediting.com.
Related posts:
- Common preposition errors and non-errors: Examples and explanations
- Why do we make typos?
- 13 Signs you’re wasting the reader’s time and how a freelance editor can help
Last revised on 7 September 2022
