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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 βbetween you and I,β or βLet we who are loyal, act promptly.β
Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as βhe was graduated from college,β or vice versa, as βhe ingratiated with the tyrant.β
Use of nouns for verbs, as βhe motored to Boston,β or βhe voiced a protest.β
Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as βIf I was he, I should do otherwise,β or βHe said the earth was round.β
The split infinitive, as βto calmly glide.β
The erroneous perfect infinitive, as βLast week I expected to have met you.β
False verb-forms, as βI pled with him.β
Use of like for as, as βI strive to write like Pope wrote.β
Misuse of prepositions, as βThe gift was bestowed to an unworthy object,β or βThe gold was divided between the five men.β
The superfluous conjunction, as βI wish for you to do this.β
Use of words in wrong senses, as βThe book greatly intrigued me,β βLeave me take this,β βHe was obsessed with the idea,β or βHe is a meticulous writer.β
Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as βa strange phenomena,β or βtwo stratas of clouds.β
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.
Of all blunders, there is hardly one which might not be avoided through diligent study of simple textbooks on grammar and rhetoric, intelligent perusal of the best authors, and care and forethought in composition. Almost no excuse exists for their persistent occurrence, since the sources of correction are so numerous and so available.
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H.P. Lovecraft