Writing, Clear and Simple

I realize that reporting the news requires moving very quickly to write, edit, and publish the stories that show up on my doorstep every day. But at times I wonder if they’ve left out the "edit" part of that process, especially when things like this show up, in an Associated Press story about Amelie Mauresmo winning her first Grand Slam title in the Australian Open:

Mauresmo then sat and hung her head, seemingly stunned and overwhelmed. She finally got up and rose her arms in triumph, choking back her own tears of emotion, as French flags fluttered in the stands, still looking less than triumphant as Henin-Hardenne continued to weep.

Anybody want to take a shot at identifying what’s wrong with that paragraph? 

You have to go back and re-read everything you write, or you run the risk of ending up with something like this:

My new article, "Don’t get lost in translation," was published in the January issue of The Editorial Eye.

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The term for words that sound the same but have different meanings (and sometimes spellings) is homophone (click for a definition), which sounds an awful lot like homophobe, so you can think of them as sound-alikes if you like. (Homophone is from Latin and means "same sound.") Whichever you prefer, homophones or sound-alikes, be aware that they can sneak in past spell-checkers and twist the meaning of your writing, frustrate your readers, and make you look a bit (or a lot, depending on how often you mix them up) silly.

One of the most frequently abused sound-alike pairs is your/you’re, which I wrote about here. But I am continually surprised by the places these things sneak in. For example, I’ve been reading a book by a writer who has a powerful way with words and stories, published by a major publisher of Christian titles. I assume this particular book has gone through a few review cycles with an editor, and very likely a copy editor and a production editor. Several eyes have seen this book before it went into print. And yet I’ve found two glaring instances where they used a homophone rather than the word they really meant to use.

The first one was flare, and from the context of the sentence, which was talking about doing something "with flare," it was obvious that he meant to use flair.

Later in the book, the author spoke of something that another writer was "eluding to." However, eluding is something that the Roadrunner does, as in "The Roadrunner easily eluded Wile E. Coyote’s trap." The word the author wanted here was alluding, because writers quite often make indirect references to things.

OK, so maybe this seems like a nit-picky thing. I’m enjoying the book very much, and I understand what the writer is saying, so what’s the big deal? The big deal is that everytime you cause your reader to stumble over a word, even if it’s ever so slight, you lose something. It might be your readers’ momentum, as they stumble over the wrong word, reflect for a moment to figure out what you meant, and then go on. If this happens too frequently, your readers may lose patience with you and give up entirely. Most importantly, mistakes like this can reduce your credibility, a hard-to-gain commodity. Don’t squander your credibility on such trivial mistakes as homophone mixups.

Make friends with your dictionary. It doesn’t hurt to look up a word or two every now and then to ensure that it means what you think it means.