Which is right: deep-seeded or deep-seated?

Ran into a bit of usage that caught my attention and made me say “That’s not right.” However, I thought that, rather than pontificating on it, I’d ask you for your thoughts.

Without consulting a usage manual or search engine, which would you say is correct?

a. He has a deep-seeded hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

b. He has a deep-seated hatred for Tickle-Me Elmo.

Sound off in the comments.

Update on Friday, June 26, 2009 at 02:44PM by Roy Jacobsen

I have the most well-informed readers in blog-dom. Yes, it should be deep-seated. This error is an eggcorn, that is, a usage error that—unlike a malapropism—actually makes sense on some level.

I wrote about eggcorns here. You can browse a growing database of eggcorns captured in the wild (including an explanation of the seated/seeded variety) here.

Tool Time: Format your words with styles

I frequently collaborate on projects with several different people, exchanging documents to review and revise. And all too often, I see documents where all of the formatting—bold, italic, font, type size, and so on— has been set manually. That’s the hard way to do it. It’s like having a woodworking shop full of expensive equipment at your disposal, but building a cabinet using only a hatchet.

What’s wrong with manual formatting?

OK, those toolbar buttons are so tempting, sitting up there at the top of your screen. It’s so easy to think, “Hey, I should emphasize that word or phrase. I’ll just highlight it and click that nice B button, and maybe the I button, too. And this line is a heading, so I’ll change the font to Arial, bump up the size a bit, and set the whole thing bold.”

Next thing you know, your document is littered with bits and bobs of manually applied formatting. And making sure that you’ve done things consistently becomes a headache. For example, let’s say that your document—a 20-page whitepaper you’ll be presenting to your boss—includes section headings, subheadings, and a bunch of other text formatting applied to different sorts of information. Are you sure you’ve always applied the same combination of formatting to the same elements in your document?

And what if you want to make a change, like changing the font of your body text from Times New Roman to Century, with a bit more space between paragraphs, and an indented first line? Then you have to go through each paragraph, selecting the text, clicking all of the menus and buttons to make the changes.

You should be focusing your attention on the content, on making sure the words say what you want them to say, and here you are, fiddling with the cosmetics, wasting precious time making the document look pretty.

Styles to the rescue

A style is a collection of text and paragraph formatting settings that you can apply with a single click. And if you decide that you want to change it, you only have to change it in one place, and the change will apply everywhere in your document.

Styles are fast, easy to use, and they help you automate things like creating a table of contents. For example, if you’ve used the various Heading styles for the headings and subheadings in your content, creating a table of contents is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks. If you applied the formatting manually, you’ll have to create your table of contents manually, too. And update it manually every time your document changes.

In Microsoft Office Word 2007, you can apply styles using the Styles area of the Home Ribbon, but only a few styles are shown. Press Alt+Ctrl+Shift+S to show the Styles window.

If you’re using OpenOffice.org Writer, you can pick styles from the formatting toolbar (shown below), or you can click Format > Styles and Formatting to display the Styles and Formatting window, which gives you more choices.

If you don’t like the looks of the default styles in either Microsoft Office Word or OpenOffice.org Writer, you can change them. You can make the changes in individual documents, or you can experiment with different templates, and have your changes apply to all of your documents.

Learn more

Microsoft has a tutorial on styles in Word on the Office Online site.

My friend Solveig Haugland is an OpenOffice.org goddess, and has a great introduction to styles in Writer on her blog.

Stop messing around with manual formatting. Start using all of the tools at your disposal. Start using styles.

“It’s not a draft, it’s a prototype!”

Despite the assurances of great writers like Ernest Hemingway that “the first draft of anything is shit,” some writers can’t bring themselves to allow that first draft to be, well, crappy.

They write a sentence, and instead of plunging on to the next sentence, they go right back to adjust the words, change the phrasing, and correct those little spelling errors. (I have to fight to overcome this tendency myself.) They don’t understand that writing and revising are different processes, and you can’t do both of them well if you try to do them simultaneously.

Ken Davis encountered this kind of thinking recently, working with some managers at a company that made printers. They told him, “Here, we work hard to get it right the first time.”

Ken persuaded them to see things his way by getting them to think of their first draft as a prototype.

I asked the managers to tell me the story of how their company developed and manufactured a new printer model.

They proceeded to describe an elaborate planning process, culminating in the building of a prototype. At this point in their story, I interrupted. "And you make sure to put the company's nameplate on that first printer?" I asked. "And you make sure to have the color of the finish just right? Because you're eventually going to sell it, right?"

The managers laughed. "Of course not," they said. "That printer is a prototype. It's not built to sell; it's built just to test."

"Ah ha!" I gloated. "So you don't do it right the first time. Because you know you won't sell the prototype, it doesn't have to be perfect. Making it perfect--with the right nameplate and paint and all--would be a huge waste of time and would distract you from the more important features that have to be tested."

Your first draft is a prototype. You don’t create it to deliver as is to the recipients; you create it, as Ken says, “to see if it does what it was designed to do.”

When engineers build prototypes, they do so knowing there will be flaws, and that they are likely to fail. But they know that failure here is not a bad thing. In fact, failure is the path to success.

Friday Links – 15 May, 2009

In a guest post at Bad Language, Jan Felt explains “distraction-free writing,” that is, using tools that strip away the bells and whistles of word processors, hide the distractions on your computer desktop, and force you to focus on the words on the page. (I use Q10 when want to shut out distractions. It works well for me.)

Related to my post on homophones yesterday: Check out the Eggcorn Database for some funny misused words.

The Grammarphobia Blog explains why it’s OK to end a sentence with “with.” For example, “I’m going out for coffee. Want to come with?”

Finally, Adam Freeman recaps “a recent outbreak of common sense throughout the English-speaking world.” In other words, some people think that plain language is good, and legalese is bad! (Shocking, but true!)

Have a good writing link? Share it with us.

Have a great weekend!

Homophonophobia

I made that word up after reading this comment on another blog:

"Pizza can definitely be done cheaper at home than from the frozen foods isle or even from the delivery joint."

When I read that bit about the “frozen food isle,” I pictured an idyllic South Pacific scene: The surf gently breaking on the shore, the sun gleaming on white sand, and palm trees gently swaying over the cases full of ice cream and microwave dinners.

And then my reverie broke, and I realized the writer meant aisle, and not isle. And I experienced a moment of homophonophobia: an extreme negative reaction to the wrong word of a homophone pair.

Homophones are words that are pronounced the same way, but mean different things. And  they are frequently spelled differently. Bear and bare, for example.

(Note that a homophone is not the same thing as a malapropism. That’s when you use a word that sounds almost like the word you should have used. I recently ran across a dandy example, where someone was writing about having trouble with the stylist that came with their smartphone. I’m sure they meant stylus. If not, that phone comes with some amazing accessories.)

Whenever I see someone use a homophone for the word they should have used, I am jolted out of following the sense of the text, and I say to myself, “Oh, that’s not at all what they meant to say.”

If someone were to write that “The Bill of Rights guarantees American citizens the right to bare arms,” I would ask them which amendment says we can rip the sleeves off our shirts. (Occasionally, I’ll burst into a giggling fit over the mental image that my witticism evokes. Yes, I am easily amused.)

Homophone abuse is insidious; spell checkers will not tell you that you’ve used the wrong word, and neither will grammar checkers. (There’s nothing grammatically wrong with “the frozen food isle,” or “the right to bare arms.”)

There are several homophone lists on the web; however, very few of them include definitions for the words, which limits their usefulness. I did find one that included links to definitions for each included word. You can find that list here.

Related:

• Watch out for sound-alike words
• When to use “your” and when to use “you’re”