The Place For My Writers Notes

Writer's Digest, August 2004, page 15 has a short note warning about common pairs of words that we often confuse in usage. Specifically:

1. Convince and persuade. "You convince someone of an idea; you persuade someone to act." Changing their minds? That's convincing. Changing what they do? That's persuasion.
2. Ensure and insure. Insurance has to do with money. Ensuring means making sure something happens.
3. Because of or due to. When the question is why something happened, the answer is because of something else. Due to goes with nouns. What's funny is that the answer for both examples given in Writer's Digest is rain. The game was canceled because of rain. And the cancellation was due to rain. Methinks a bit more differentiation of the examples would have been helpful.
4. That and which. My own favorite mistake. Use that for essential clauses. Which, separated by commas, is used for nonessential clauses. Not that I understand it well, but the phrase, which I borrowed for the occasion, came wrapped in punctuation.
5. Anxious and eager. Anxious includes the notion of fear or worry. Eager is just plain excited. When we think we did well on a test, we might be eager to get the results. But when we really don't want to know, we might be anxious to get the results.

These may not be your favorite confusions and wordy contortions. But you might want to keep an eye out for the words that you stumble over. When you find yourself replacing which with that for the umpteenth time, you might as well make it part of your personal editing to do a search and destroy on dangling whiches. Or whatever you find tricksy.

Got it? Take these or other lists of confusing words and phrases, and keep track of where you find yourself stumbling a bit. Then make sure you check those during the polishing of your stories.

Like using fine-grit sandpaper to finish up the woodwork. Get rid of those scratches and splinters before the editors get hung up on them.