When a Perfectly Good Word Is the Wrong Word

Sometimes we laugh when we catch our spelling mistakes and word choices in a manuscript.

Sometimes we cringe.

Although I’m neither a great speller nor a great typist, I’ve learned some ways we can corral these wild words.

I’ve lumped good-but-wrong-word challenges into four categories, then, based on (sometimes embarrassing) experience, I’ve also listed 19 suggestions for choosing and spelling perfectly good words to help you more clearly convey what you want to communicate.

Challenges

• Misspelling the right word. I culled examples from drafts of some manuscripts I’ve written or critiqued. I added, in parentheses, the lead definition from New Oxford American Dictionary to show you how far afield each word’s meaning was from what I intended. Many words are used as different parts of speech and have multiple definitions. For simplicity’s sake, I’ve only included the dictionary’s lead definition in these examples. The first word in every pair is the one I originally included—the second is what I meant to write:
  • “descendent” (adjective: “descending from an ancestor: descendent groups | a peculiar genealogy that buds off numerous descendent species.”) vs. “descendant” (noun: “a person, plant, or animal that is descended from a particular ancestor: Shakespeare’s last direct descendant”). This example is of particular importance if we are writing family histories. I’m not alone in my confusion, because the New Oxford American Dictionary included a section for usage. “The correct spelling for the noun meaning ‘person descended from a particular ancestor’ is descendant, ending with the suffix –ant, not –ent (as in she claims to be a descendant of Paul Revere). The word descendent is an adjective, now used almost exclusively in scientific contexts, meaning ‘descending from an ancestor’ (as in extinct species are replaced by descendent species). Almost 15 percent of the citations for the noun in the Oxford English Corpus use the wrong spelling.” This example is of particular importance if you are writing family histories.
  • “coup” (noun: “a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government”) vs. “coupe” (noun: “a car with a fixed roof, two doors, and a sloping rear”). I also noticed chicken “coup” in another writer’s draft manuscript where she meant chicken “coop” (noun: “a cage or pen for confining poultry”).
  • “crotched” (adjective: “referring to the part of the human body between the legs where they join the torso”) vs. “crocheted” (verb: “make a garment or piece of fabric using crochet: she had crocheted the shawl”). After interviewing one of my cousins about our great-grandmother, I wrote: “Grandma Lou crotched all the time.” Our great-grandmother was a proper lady. Thankfully, I caught and corrected this misspelling.
• Misspelling proper nouns
  • Although “Deborah” is the more common spelling, it’s not how my cousin “Debra” spells her given name.
  • Some names have many variations. For instance, let us count the ways, at Wikipedia, to spell the name Sheri: Chari, Cheri, Cherie, Cherri, Cherrie, Cherry, Shari, Sherie, Sherri, Sherrie, Sherry, Shery.
• Misspelling words that habitually give me pause—I often have to look up “lay”; past and past participle “laid” (verb: “put something down”) vs. “lie,” ^“lies,” “lying”; past “lay”; past participle “lain” (verb: “(of a person or animal) be in or assume a horizontal or resting position on a supporting surface.”)
• Mistyping which leads to misspelled words—Although I know a correct spelling and definition, sometimes my fingers have poor muscle memory for certain words. Unfortunately, the word I intended and the word I type look a lot alike when I’m reading a draft. My commonly mistyped words include:
  • “though” (conjunction: “despite the fact that; although, however”) vs. “through” (preposition: expressing movement into one side and out of the other side”)
  • “country” (noun: a nation with its own government, occupying a particular territory) vs. “county” (noun: a political and administrative division of a state)
  • “desert” (noun: a dry, barren area of land, especially one covered with sand . . .” vs. “dessert” (noun: the sweet course eaten at the end of a meal)

19 Suggestions

Adapt these following suggestions as needed while writing and editing your manuscript.

• Rest your eyes. When possible, reread your draft after a brief break—or after a walk, nap, or good night’s sleep.
• Read aloud what you’ve written. This is another way to slow down while editing. Sometimes our ears catch mistakes that our eyes have missed.
• Read from end to beginning (sort of): Sometimes when I’m editing, I’ll read the last paragraph or page, then the next to the last paragraph or page, and continue until I’ve finished at the beginning.
• Listen as someone or something reads your draft aloud. Check your word processing software to see if you already have this function. If you’ve never used it before, search the Internet for instructions. Or search “text to speech” or “text to voice” to see what other apps or software will work for you.
• Belong to a critique group. Critique groups include other people who see what you wrote—not what you intended. As a bonus, reading, critiquing, and commenting on another writers work usually helps us become better writers and self-editors.
• Ask a friend or relative to read your manuscript. Be judicious in your choice. My friend Lynne has the eyes of an editor. So does a shirttail cousin, Helen. My great-grandmother’s given name was “Lula.” Helen mentioned I’d spelled “Lola” in the manuscript’s title. And as simple as my great-grandmother’s name was, I also found I’d occasionally spelled her name as “Lulu” in the document.
• Keep a list of words you frequently misspell and use incorrectly. Search your document for each problematic word as you near your final edit.
• Verify the spelling of every proper noun/name. That is, a name used for an individual person, place, or organization, usually spelled with initial capital letters. I included my sister’s memories of stopping by on the way home from school to visit our great-grandmother. I’m glad I checked every proper noun in my document because I’d inadvertently dropped one of the double letters in the school named “Tibbetts.”
• Search your document for inconsistent spelling. I spelled one location where my great-grandmother lived as both “Parrott City” and “Parrot City.” When I checked the internet, I found both spellings there, too. No official website exists for the present-day ghost town. The place does not appear on any official map I could locate. In my search for official websites, I found the correct spelling at the Animas Museum’s website and in The Durango (Colorado) Herald digital archives in an article titled “Parrott City Miners – 1881” (Link: 25 Jan 2021, 12:02 pm, durangoherald.com, https://www.durangoherald.com/articles/photo-parrott-city-miners-1881). I further verified the spelling with notations my grandmother, a local spelling bee champion, had written on a photo taken in the 1880s and another from the 1940s.
• Make friends with your dictionary. Because I do most of my writing on a computer, I appreciate my dictionary app. I often use it to verify if a word is hyphenated or spelled as one word or two words. I also look up words in the dictionary my sister gave me for high school graduation and my dad’s old dictionary, shown above. Consult specialized dictionaries (e.g., foreign language, medical, legal) as needed.
• Have handy access to a list of words that many people often misuse. For instance, The Chicago Manual of Style Seventeenth Edition includes fifty pages in their “Glossary of Problematic Words and Phrases.” Some grammar books include a similar list. Search the internet for “commonly misused words.”
• Heed correction hints as needed. ProWritingAid, a grammar checker and style editor, provided a helpful hint about when to use “wether” (a castrated goat when used as a noun) and when to use “whether” (indicate doubt between alternatives when used as a conjunction.”
• Use, but don’t blindly trust, your word-processing spell checker. Don’t assume your spell checker is smarter than you are or can correctly guess your intended meaning. Maximize your spell checker’s usefulness by checking it from time to time. I’ve inadvertently added incorrectly spell words. In Word, I can delete or add entries from my AutoCorrect list as needed.
• Search for inconsistencies. For instance, while writing one family story, I noticed I’d referred to my great-grandfather as both “Grampa John” and “Grandpa John.” I also noticed one cousin was born in the town of “Middleboro” and her son was born in “Middleborough.” From the website of the Town of Middleborough, Massachusetts, I learned the correct spelling is “Middleborough.”
• Honor your niggling doubts. If it doesn’t “look right” it may not be.
• Use your synonym finder. Sometimes I’ll add a word that is close to what I intend, but not quite. I’ll quickly search my word processor’s synonym finder. Or revisit my well-worn copy of Rodale’s The Synonym Finder.
• Use a program or app that catches unusual words or spellings. For instance, I can set ProWritingAid, grammar checker and style editor, to “American English.” When I write “grey” a note pops up, letting me know “this is the UK spelling.”
• Learn from mistakes. I have a list of words I commonly misspell. Decades ago, my supervisor caught my most embarrassing misspelling in a draft business report. To this day, I search my manuscripts for the word “pubic” (adjective: “relating to the pubes or pubis: pubic hair”) and replace it as needed with “public” (adjective: “of or concerning the people as a whole”).
• Note corrections for future editions. Incorrect spellings and improper word choices slip into printed copies even if we, and others, have looked over our draft documents. I printed several hundred copies of In-Laws and Outlaws and Three Kinds of Cheeses—The Frame Family Cookbook. Before the reunion to celebrate my grandparents’ 50^th anniversary, my sisters and I proudly presented the first copy to our (spelling-bee-champion) grandmother. She flipped through it and stopped at my Pomegranate-Chicken Salad Sandwich recipe, pointed to the list of ingredients, and read “chunks of choked chicken.” She chuckled. “Well, I guess you have to wring a chicken’s neck before you cook it.” I did the only thing possible. I noted the mistyped word, and other corrections, on a markup copy for a future edition. Years later, I sent the corrections to my niece, who had offered to update our family’s cookbook.

• I’d hoped to have a round 20 suggestions. Do you have another suggestion to add to my 19?
• How do you verify that your word choices convey what you want to communicate?
• Do you have additional suggestions on how to verify you’re using the word you intended?