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Then vs Than

rustyken 🚫

I am amazed at the number times 'then' is used when it should be 'than'. Many times it occurs in highly rated stories. At times it causes a significant disruption in following the story line.

So do they not teach the difference any more?

Dominions Son 🚫

@rustyken

There is only one letter difference. Why do you assume that this is due to not knowing the difference rather than just a typographical error?

Replies:   Justin Case
Justin Case 🚫

@Dominions Son

Because it happens pretty often all throughout a story.

I'd also recommend people learning the difference between "breaks" and "BRAKES".

Might eliminate some of the motor vehicle crashes too.

Replies:   DBActive
DBActive 🚫

@Justin Case

hroughout a story.

I'd also recommend people learning the difference between "breaks" and "BRAKES".

Might eliminate some of the motor v

Also: role and roll; waist and waste; pole and poll; and a bunch of others. I often wonder if some of this is caused by the writer using a dictation program.

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫

@DBActive

Casualty and causality.

AJ

Keet 🚫

@rustyken

I'm more amazed about the number of times of 'that' where it should be 'than'. There seems to be some kind of allergy among writers that makes them avoid 'than' even if it's grammatically correct :)

richardshagrin 🚫

@rustyken

THAN can be deconstructed by removing the H which makes you Tan, lots of people try to avoid changing color. Or you might be Han, which is ethnically Chinese. Just AN should probably be avoided if the next word is AL. Just N is a bad word, you shouldn't use the N word. It can be ok to be bigger, replace the b with an N and a lot of people get upset. A by itself is a vowel, and people are used to vowel movements.

Michael Loucks 🚫

@rustyken

So do they not teach the difference any more?

Sadly, both ProWritingAid and Grammarly have trouble with that, than, and then. Both of them make incorrect suggestions in that regard.

So, not only are grammar and vocabulary not taught or learned properly, the tools meant to help don't get it right, either.

And forget them if you write medical, legal, or technical passages. They both lose their sh-t on those, along with messing up stock phrases.

Dicrostonyx 🚫

@rustyken

I suspect that the problem is more with editing than writing. Everyone makes typos when writing. The secret to catching them is to have multiple editors and have both the original author and the editors doing multiple passes (re-reads) to find and correct them.

Replies:   REP
REP 🚫

@Dicrostonyx

I suspect that the problem is more with editing than writing.

Typos do happen. However, when a writer repeatedly makes the same mistake, then I doubt it is a typo. I wouldn't put the blame on the editor other than the fact that they missed a mistake.

The writer should get the initial blame for they made the mistake. The second dose of blame goes to the writer also for they should review what they wrote and fixed the error before it got to the editor; although we all tend to overlook our mistakes.

Once the writer misses the error, then the remaining blame goes to the editor. Personally, I like to do a final read through to make sure everything is correct. Even then I miss some things.

The misuse of 'then' and 'than' is one of my pet peeves. If you get confused try to remember that 'then' is related to time and 'than' is used with comparisons.

Replies:   ystokes  PotomacBob
ystokes 🚫

@REP

The misuse of 'then' and 'than' is one of my pet peeves. If you get confused try to remember that 'then' is related to time and 'than' is used with comparisons.

Ahh REP you ruined it. I was counting how many posts it would take before someone explained what the difference was between the two words.

Answer 6

Replies:   REP
REP 🚫
Updated:

@ystokes

............. :)

PotomacBob 🚫

@REP

However, when a writer repeatedly makes the same mistake, then I doubt it is a typo.

My experience is different. Typos exactly like that are the ones I make most frequently, when typing at my normal speed. There are simply some words that I mis-type every time - unless I slow my typing speed to a crawl.

Dominions Son 🚫

@PotomacBob

There are simply some words that I mis-type every time - unless I slow my typing speed to a crawl.

I have a similar problem with certain specific word pairs.

Switch Blayde 🚫

@PotomacBob

There are simply some words that I mis-type every time

Ernest Bywater always typed "use" as "sue."

Replies:   Dominions Son
Dominions Son 🚫
Updated:

@Switch Blayde

Ernest Bywater always typed "use" as "sue."

He also pretty consistently typed "teh" where "the" was called for.

Replies:   mauidreamer
mauidreamer 🚫

@Dominions Son

While the "sue">"use" is not as common as the "teh">"the" typing errors, most word processing software should contain them within the autocorrect lists ...

EB appeared computer-literate enough to have managed those corrections ..

Dominions Son 🚫

@mauidreamer

EB appeared computer-literate enough to have managed those corrections ..

but he still made them all the time in the forum.

tendertouch 🚫

@mauidreamer

Even a computer savvy person might have autocorrect turned off. I don't know what system he used, but Pages on my iPad (and maybe on a Mac) has a horrible habit of autocorrecting something like

"Who was she?" she said.

To

"Who was she?" She said.

This happens with either an exclamation mark or question mark. So I keep it turned off when I'm writing because it's easier for me to go back and look for squiggles than it is to track down those types of introduced errors.

awnlee jawking 🚫

@tendertouch

This happens with either an exclamation mark or question mark.

What about an ellipsis, eg

"But he's your brother..." she said.

Does that get incorrected as well?

AJ

Replies:   tendertouch
tendertouch 🚫

@awnlee jawking

Nope, looks like it gets that right. I suppose that makes some sense since it's common enough to have an ellipses in the middle of a sentence.

awnlee jawking 🚫

@tendertouch

Thanks.

Of course that raises the question of what it does when you try to end a normal sentence with an ellipsis ;-)

AJ

Replies:   tendertouch  Dicrostonyx
tendertouch 🚫

@awnlee jawking

That works fine β€” it recognizes the end of the quote and doesn't capitalize, but if there's no quote it capitalizes the next word.

Dicrostonyx 🚫

@awnlee jawking

It could also depend on space usage. So

"That doesn't look right..."

might look different to the program than

"That doesn't look right... "

With MS Office and LibreOffice, how and where you place spaces determines whether you get a hyphen or double hyphen or have them autocorrected to an en-dash or em-dash.

Granted, there probable aren't a lot of SOL authors who care about the correct usage of the three marks; most probably confine themselves to either a colon or hyphen.

Grey Wolf 🚫
Updated:

@tendertouch

Most modern editors (excepting pure text editors, of course) also translate '...' to an ellipsis, which is a single character (single-character HTML ellipsis: (single-character help ellipsis: …)) and can be flagged differently than period, exclamation point, etc. They're usually smart enough that, when you backspace over the one-character ellipsis, it's translated back into two '.'s.

helmut_meukel 🚫

@tendertouch

This happens with either an exclamation mark or question mark.

That's because the programmer of this feature regarded '!' and '?' as end-of-sentence, same as a full stop '.'
Consequently the begin of the new sentence has to be uppercase.
To correctly implement the rules when an exclamation mark or a question mark has to be treated like a full stop and when not isn't trivial.

HM.

Replies:   Keet
Keet 🚫

@helmut_meukel

To correctly implement the rules when an exclamation mark or a question mark has to be treated like a full stop and when not isn't trivial.

Testing for (closing) quotes directly after the exclamation or question mark followed by a CR or CR/LF should catch 99.9% of the cases where the next word should start with uppercase.

Replies:   tendertouch  BlacKnight
tendertouch 🚫

@Keet

Yep, simple pattern matching. Even if they get it wrong it's easy for the user to shift to uppercase, but I haven't found a way to shift to lowercase without pulling up the on-screen keyboard.

Replies:   Dominions Son
Dominions Son 🚫

@tendertouch

but I haven't found a way to shift to lowercase without pulling up the on-screen keyboard.

Switch to a real computer with a real keyboard. :)

BlacKnight 🚫

@Keet

Testing for (closing) quotes directly after the exclamation or question mark followed by a CR or CR/LF should catch 99.9% of the cases where the next word should start with uppercase.

It's not that simple, because of the way exclamation and question marks work when the sentence continues after the closing quote.

"Who is that?" she asked in a jealous tone.

"Who is that?" She asked the question in a jealous tone.

The first is one sentence. The second is two. If the quote were a statement, the first would have a comma before the closing quote and the second would have a full stop, but question and exclamation marks don't transform like that. (Maybe they should. We could have a variant with a comma instead of a dot at the bottom.) Figuring out when a sentence is continuing after the closing quote versus when a new sentence is starting takes a lot more actual comprehension than autocorrupt has, and context that isn't even available yet when it's making the choice whether to capitalize.

I turn off autocorrupt whenever possible. I use a lot of unusual words, and so spend far more time trying to convince it that I did in fact mean to type "hauberk" or "hyperdrive" than it does actually correcting my exceedingly rare tpyos. And just as a general philosophy, I do not approve of machines that don't do what I tell them to.

Replies:   tendertouch
tendertouch 🚫

@BlacKnight

In the context of my original issue it is that simple. The issue was that it is automatically capitalizing the next word, not that it's automatically converting to lower case. If it followed the suggested rule getting a capital to start the next sentence is as easy as using the shift key. As it stands, there is no way short of bringing up the onscreen keyboard to shift that character to lower case.

So, using that rule it won't always shift to a capital letter when you want, but it won't force a capital when you don't want one.

Personally, I'm a lousy typist so corrections are welcome and mostly pretty decent.

Keet 🚫

@tendertouch

Even a computer savvy person might have autocorrect turned off. I don't know what system he used,

LibreOffice Writer on Linux.

REP 🚫

@PotomacBob

I see writing as having 2 parts: writing and editing. I write a scene and don't worry about my typos. But then I re-read my scene several times to find and correct my errors. I still miss some so that is why I run my story through my editor. When I get the edited story back, I go through it again looking for any remaining errors and to ensure that the edits didn't change what I intended the passage to say.

If the majority of your typos are surviving the editing phase and being posted, then you and your editor are not doing your jobs.

richardshagrin 🚫

@rustyken

Type O is a blood type. A, B and AB are other blood types. There is also a RH negative or positive part of blood types. Blood E is a type of story, with lots of bleeding. Can be spelled bloody.

DBActive 🚫

@rustyken

I am sure that most of the errors are from ignorance rather than typos. Otherwise, how can you explain the prevalence of some of them. A couple I see all the the time are "counsel/council" and "Champaign/Champagne". Those aren't typos.

Dominions Son 🚫
Updated:

@DBActive

I am sure that most of the errors are from ignorance rather than typos. Otherwise, how can you explain the prevalence of some of them. A couple I see all the the time are "counsel/council" and "Champaign/Champagne". Those aren't typos.

It gets into the nature of the error.

A pair of real words that are only one letter off, like than/then, I am more likely to think it a typo rather than a lack of knowing the difference.

On the other hand once you get into more complicated errors repeated consistently like your examples of "counsel/council" and "Champaign/Champagne" which are more than a single letter difference and I'm more likely to think ignorance rather than typo.

Michael Loucks 🚫

@Dominions Son

On the other hand once you get into more complicated errors repeated consistently like your examples of "counsel/council" and "Champaign/Champagne" which are more than a single letter difference and I'm more likely to think ignorance rather than typo.

Or your brain has you type the wrong word, even though you know better. I do that with counsel and council, and have to stop to think each time to keep my fingers from typing 'counsel' every time. Don't ask me why, but I have to actually concentrate to type 'council (and I hit the 's' instead of 'c' when I went to type that KNOWING what I was supposed to type a 'c'!).

Replies:   Grey Wolf
Grey Wolf 🚫

@Michael Loucks

I occasionally do the same with counsel / council, though it's gotten better the more things with that name I'm dealing with. Every so often I have to expend a few seconds on capital / capitol, even though I almost never mess them up - it's just paranoia. Principal / principle, too - seldom a problem, but the error would be annoying.

Replies:   helmut_meukel
helmut_meukel 🚫

@Grey Wolf

Here some more:
hanger – hangar (ever seen a hanger on an airfield?)
antichamber – antechamber
faint – feint (in a sword fight it may be your death if you faint)

HM.

Replies:   Dominions Son  DBActive
Dominions Son 🚫

@helmut_meukel

ever seen a hanger on an airfield?

No, but with all the luggage moving around it's not particularly implausible.

DBActive 🚫

@helmut_meukel

Peek/peak/pique

Switch Blayde 🚫

@Dominions Son

repeated consistently like your examples of "counsel/council"

I have several words like that. I simply type the first spelling that comes to mind, highlight it, right click on it (in Word), and look at the synonyms. That tells me if it was the correct one.

If it's not, and I forget the other spelling, I put the first one in Google followed by "vs" and Google fills in the other one.

I could never have been an author using only a typewriter and thesaurus back when.

Replies:   Dominions Son
Dominions Son 🚫

@Switch Blayde

I have several words like that. I simply type the first spelling that comes to mind, highlight it, right click on it (in Word), and look at the synonyms.

I do something similar.

tendertouch 🚫

@DBActive

Could be. There's another class of error, though, that I fall prey to far too often, but I'm not even sure what to call it.

I know the difference between "you're" and "your", as well as between "It's" and "its", but for whatever reason I type the contraction for the pronoun/possessive maybe a third of the time.

Replies:   LupusDei
LupusDei 🚫

@tendertouch

I do it too. And I don't pronounce English at all. Or do it my own proprietary version incomprehensible to anyone. On the upside I'm rather immune to homonym errors, simply because using strict phonetic alphabet of another language to render letters as sounds they're not homonyms to me.

But I mix a and e for no discernible reasons. Okay, English pronunciations of those are just backwards from my native language all too often.

Then, I write a lot on my phone nowadays, and while it's definitely slower than I could type on full keyboard, I like and rely a lot on the predictive suggestions -- NOT autocorrect -- to get the spelling right and long words finished. If I don't know the spelling, I try something and look what is offered.

But sometimes I get it wrong, miss-tap, or usually simply don't look closely enough on a long word and may have a completely wrong word that look somewhat visually similar with slightly blurry eyes.

Replies:   LupusDei
LupusDei 🚫
Updated:

@LupusDei

Also, can someone explain what's the difference between v and w is, to me they are all the same. I often have to experiment a lot until the prediction of what I try to write flips it to the correct one. Then there's all those silent c and h stuck in random places.

Replies:   Switch Blayde
Switch Blayde 🚫
Updated:

@LupusDei

what's the difference between v and w

They're simply different letters, like "n" and "m" are.

Now that's in English. In Hawaiian, the "w" has a "v" sound under certain conditions. I think if the "w" is followed by two vowels it's pronounced as a "v". My great grandsons have Hawaiian names. One is "Kawai." The "w" is pronounced as a "v" (he's going to have hell when he starts school).

There's an old joke:

Two guys are arguing whether the state of Hawaii is pronounced "Hawaii" or "Havaii." An old Jewish man walks by so they stop him and ask him.

"Havaii," the Jewish man says.

"Thank you," the man who won the argument says.

"You're Velcome," the Jewish man says.

But Hawaii actually has the "v" sound (in Hawaiian).

ETA:
Btw, although "Hawaii" is the anglicized spelling used throughout the rest of the United States of America, Hawai'i, spelled with an okina between the i's, is the spelling used by most local Hawaiian people. That's how my daughter-in-law spells it (she's part Hawaiian and speaks Hawaiian as well as used to teach hula and compete in Hula competitions).

Replies:   LupusDei
LupusDei 🚫
Updated:

@Switch Blayde

German have both too, but German V is almost F and is rendered so in Latvian, and W is what Latvian has as V, the one and only. The English difference is much softer, by my impressions, and both are rendered as V in Latvian in all cases. And since I don't speak English at all and often pronounce written English as if it was Latvian, the difference is completely lost on me.

ETA: yes, I probably say, "I woted."

Justin Case 🚫

@rustyken

Graduates can't read, can't write, can't spell, can't balance a checkbook, and can't choose the proper words to use.
… but they sure were well indoctrinated with the latest "woke crap".

Society is on the DECLINE for sure.

Replies:   ystokes
ystokes 🚫

@Justin Case

… but they sure were well indoctrinated with the latest "woke crap".

I am so sick of this fake made up word.

Switch Blayde 🚫

@ystokes

this fake made up word

It's in Merriam-Webster:

chiefly US slang
1
: aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)

2
disapproving : politically liberal (as in matters of racial and social justice) especially in a way that is considered unreasonable or extreme

Replies:   Dominions Son
Dominions Son 🚫

@Switch Blayde

@ystokes

this fake made up word

It's in Merriam-Webster:

chiefly US slang

And it should be clearly noted that the first sense (Definition #1) was created by social justice activists. They used it themselves for years, before their political opponents started to use the term to mock them.

Michael Loucks 🚫

@ystokes

I am so sick of this fake made up word.

Every single word ever in history is 'made up' because someone had to be the first to use it. And words have changed meaning over time (e.g. 'Science' for Shakespeare had a different meaning than it does for us; ditto 'computer' before the digital age).

Take issue with the concept, but a word is simply a collection of sounds that conveys meaning. And we invent new ones all the time.

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫

@Michael Loucks

Every single word ever in history is 'made up' because someone had to be the first to use it.

I believe 'mama' and its variants are common to all cultures as the first recognisable thing most babies say. You could argue that it's not a made-up word.

AJ

Switch Blayde 🚫

@awnlee jawking

You could argue that it's not a made-up word.

"Ouch" too.

But I guess when someone decided how to spell it (write it) they made up the word.

Replies:   awnlee jawking
awnlee jawking 🚫

@Switch Blayde

But I guess when someone decided how to spell it (write it) they made up the word.

Is writing a prerequisite for language? I don't think whales and dolphins can write but they have a language of sorts. Obviously their first words aren't 'mama' ;-)

AJ

helmut_meukel 🚫

@awnlee jawking

I believe 'mama' and its variants are common to all cultures as the first recognisable thing most babies say.

While 'mama' exists of many languages, its meaning can be quite different:
in Martuthunira (a language of the Pilbara region of Western Australia): paternal uncle (one's father's brother)
in Maguindanao (spoken by a majority of the population of Maguindanao in the Philippines) and Maranao:[adjective] male, [noun] a male
in Fijian: ring (for one's finger)
in 'Are'are (spoken by the ꞌAreꞌare people in the Solomon Islands archipelago): father
in Garu (spoken in Meghalaya, Assam, Bangladesh): 1. maternal uncle, 2. husband of aunt, 3. father-in-law, 4. brother of father-in-law
in Bengali (West Bengal): maternal uncle
in Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi: maternal uncle (in its feminine form: maternal uncle's wife)
in Nepali: a mother's brother; maternal uncle; (slang) a police officer
in Pitjantjatjara (spoken by the Pitjantjatjara people of Central Australia): 1. father; 2. father's older brother or close male friend; uncle; 3. god
In some Asian languages: mama (as verb): to chew betel

Seems to be mostly a European languages' word, borrowed by some other languages from a European language.

HM.

Michael Loucks 🚫
Updated:

@awnlee jawking

I believe 'mama' and its variants are common to all cultures as the first recognisable thing most babies say. You could argue that it's not a made-up word.

Not all, and variations around the 'm', 'b', 'p', and 'v' sounds abound, as those are easiest to make.

It's also true that babies don't attach meaning to those sounds when they first make them.

ystokes 🚫

@rustyken

Two I have seen.
He played the base like Geddi Lee from Rush.

He drove onto the bass after checking in.

The one thing I don't understand is how two words can be spelled the same yet pronounced differently like bass with a long A and bass with a short a.

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