May
19
2011
Abuse/Misuse/Disabuse
To abuse something means to treat it so badly that you damage it.
To misuse something means to use it wrongly.
To disabuse someone or something means to show them that their thinking is wrong.
Affect/Effect
Affect is a verb and effect is a noun. So you affect something by having an effect on it. (The exception is if you effect a change; that is, cause a change to happen.)
USEFUL MNEMONIC:
RAVEN , that is: Remember Affect Verb Effect Noun
Among/Between
Use between for two things; among for more than two.
Between you and me, there’s no way we can divide these five loaves and two fishes among our five thousand guests.
Useful mnemonic:
beTween = Two
aMong = Many
Jun
16
2010
Even when they don’t refer to medical language, these two words have quite different meanings. Contagious refers to how fast something can spread, while infectious means the irresistible quality of something.
Writing tip: use contagious to refer to unpleasant things.
- Predominant VS Predominate
These two words are often confonded in adverb forms, i.e. predominantly and predominately. However, predominant is an adjective and predominate is a verb.
Writing tip: use a mnemonic device to avoid confusing them:
The word ant is not a verb, but the word ate is. So if ate works in your sentence, you should write predominate.
A foreword (some people also mispell it foreward) refers to the first pages of a book; its synonym could be preface.
Forward is not a noun, but can be a verb, an averb or an adjective, e.g. “He moved forward“, “I forwarded him this e-mail“, etc.
