Month: July 2008

“advised of”

Common English Blunders, Prepositions, Verbs

I saw this combination this morning.

Problem:
The preposition “of” should not follow the verb “advised”.

Explanation:
When used as an intransitive verb, “advise” means to offer advice.

This morning I saw a sentence such as “He was advised of the situation.”

If we were to apply the definition of the intransitive verb “advise” to the sentence, we would get “He was offered advice of the situation.”

That would literally mean “He was offered the situation’s advice.”, but the situation itself has no advice.

Instead, the writer of the sentence was trying to say “He was told about the situation.”

This gives us the solution, which is that the intransitive verb “advised” should be followed by the preposition “about” instead of the preposition “of”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following combinations (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “advised of” — 7,480,000 matches
  • “advised about” — 136,000 matches

This tells me that Web authors have used the incorrect vs. correct preposition by a ratio of 55-to-1, which is absolutely dreadful.

Solution:
“advised about”

“… it’s reliant upon System Ready-ness …”

Misspellings, Nouns

I saw this in a software test-plan document.

Problem:
“Ready-ness” — with the letter Y followed by a hyphen in the middle — is a misspelled noun.

Explanation:
As with many other words that end with the letter Y, the “y” in “ready” must be changed to “i” when the suffix N-E-S-S is appended to a word such as “ready”.

Furthermore, no hyphen should appear in the word “readiness”.

Beyond these two problems, there was no need to capitalize “System” and “Ready-ness”.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following words (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

  • “readiness” — with the letter I in the middle — 17,700,000 matches
  • “ready-ness” — with the letter Y and a hyphen in the middle — 1,130 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the word correctly vs. incorrectly by a ratio of 15,664-to-1, which is superb.

Solution:
“… it’s reliant upon system readiness …”

“Download it for free.”

Adjectives, Common English Blunders, Idioms, Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs

My wife saw this the other day on Oprah.com.

Problem:
“For free” is an informal idiom that bothers many readers.

Explanation:
For fun, I checked Google for the idiom “for free” (with the quotation marks) and got about 348,000,000 matches. Wow!

Many readers are bothered by the “for free” idiom because the word “for” is a preposition, prepositions should be followed by nouns or pronouns, and the word “free” is neither a noun nor a pronoun.

The word “free” is either a verb or an adjective. Some use the word “free” as an adverb — as in “running free” — but the correct way to make “free” into an adverb is to add the letters L-Y to the end — as in “running freely”.

One of the definitions of the word “free” as an adjective is without charge, cost, or payment — as in “free nachos with every beer purchased this evening”.

This gives us our solution, given that any preposition — such as “for” — should not be followed by an adjective — such as “free”.

Solution:
“Download it without charge.”