A Great Site on "Common Errors in English"

Those of you who like "Grammar Trap" will love a great site from Washington State University, "Common Errors in English".

When you get there, don't be tempted to "cut" right to the "Errors" list available from the bottom of the page. Paul Brians' site is much richer than the array of "common errors" he explains so well.

Brians provides a "Commonly Made Suggestions" page, and his answers to the suggestions he's gotten are both lucid and funny.

He has a "To Do List" page that lets you know what he's planning to address when he has the time. That page gives you the opportunity to "chime in" on the subjects he hasn't gotten around to addressing yet.

I probably enjoyed his "Non-Errors" page the most. It's idiosyncratic but insightful. (I gave him "insightful" because he's awfully good and "idiosyncratic" because I don't always agree with him.)

Among the questions Brians answers are the following.

• What is an error in English?
• But isn't one person's mistake another's standard usage?
• Aren't some of these points awfully picky?
• What gives you the right to say what's an error in English?
• I'm learning English as a second language. Will this site help me improve my English? (In his answer to this question Brians suggests some helpful resources beyond his own.)

All this, more, and his explanations of common errors, too.

I think he's wrong, wrong, wrong about "since" and "because." (See his "Non-Errors" page and my 1997 "Grammar Trap".)

But I still want to be Paul Brians when I grow up. (Too bad he's an IU alum.)

Laura Hoelscher <lah@purdue.edu>

Graphic Quality & PDFs

Last month's article, "Fit Your Graphics Files to Your Purpose", prompted a couple questions from Brian MacGowan, Extension Wildlife Specialist based in Columbia City.

Basically, he wanted to know why photos look good in the Microsoft Word file but then look really bad when the file is created into a PDF. This is a bigger concern with photos that have words in them (e.g., diagrams). Brian's big question, however, was what graphic file type should be used for Web-only PDF documents.

Great questions, Brian.

PDFs are specifically intended to look as good as possible on the screen and yet contain high-resolution information for downloading and printing. They also are self-compressing for small, downloadable files.

The problem that you run into with PDFs made from some Microsoft Word files has to do with the fact that photos or graphics copied/pasted into Word are not linked to the original digital files. With the graphic files disconnected from Word file, you are not getting all of the high-resolution information into the PDF.

My suggestion would be to create your text-plus-picture articles in an application that is designed for commercial printing (Adobe PageMaker or Quark Xpress, for example) to get the best of both worlds. That's what we in Ag Comm do for both Web-only documents and printed publications that are made into PDFs for the Web.

If you are limited to Microsoft Word for composing your publications, be sure to use the "Insert/file" menus when adding graphics. "Cutting" and "Pasting" from the original photo file will without question lead to fuzzy, low-resolution photos in your PDF.

Be advised, however, that TIFs should not be your format of choice if your pub is to be viewed only on the Web. TIFs work well in PDFs that will be viewed and printed. But with a PowerPoint or Web-only document (html), a GIF or JPG is best. Because they do not contain high-res print info, your files are much smaller and so download faster.

Russ Merzdorf <merzdorf@purdue.edu>

Grammar Trap: Importantly vs. Important (at the Beginning of a Sentence)

Sticklers don't use "more importantly" or "most importantly" at the beginning of a sentence. They (we) use "more important" or "most important."

Why? "Importantly" is an adverb and thus modifies a verb. "Important" is an adjective and thus modifies a noun.

Example: Most importantly, I want a job that gives me fulfillment.

Does the sentence mean that the writer wants to be given fulfillment in an important as opposed to an unimportant way? Not really.

The sentence means that the whole idea, "I want a job that gives me fulfillment," is the most important thing that the writer has mentioned.

The preferred version follows.

Example: Most important, I want a job that gives me fulfillment.

Tip: The same applies to "first," "second," and so on.

Exception: "Finally" is okay to use, but I'll be dipped if I know why.

If there's a grammar (or usage) trap you'd like to see discussed, if you have a tip that will help the rest of us avoid one, or if you know why it's okay to use "finally," please let me know.

Laura Hoelscher <lah@purdue.edu>