Last week, I shared some commonly misspelt words to help you avoid the embarrassment of spelling slips that could harm your carefully cultivated professional image. Here are some more misspelt or misused words to avoid:
1) Peek, peak and pique
Like ‘there’ and ‘their’, here’s another example of words that sound the same but mean entirely different things. ‘Peek’ is taking a quick look at something – like a sneak peek – whereas a ‘peak’ is used to refer to the summit of a mountain or a pinnacle of performance. As for ‘pique’ (as in “pique your curiosity”), that means to provoke interest or a reaction.
2) Who versus that
Many people get this one wrong. These two words can be used when you’re describing someone or something but they are not, as some seem to think, interchangeable! When describing a person, be sure to use ‘who’ and when describing an object, use ‘that’. For example, you could say “Melanie recommends hiring an expert who knows what works when you need marketing copy that gets results.” Pretty simple really!
3) Meaningless comparisons
Personally, I hate utterly meaningless sentences of the type beloved by car manufacturers like the example below:
(Insert marque here) is faster, better, stronger.
Faster, better, stronger … than what? What are you comparing your car to? A donkey? A competitor? An older model?
Whatever you’re promoting, if you’re claiming that your product or service is superior to something else, make sure you are always clarifying what that something else is … otherwise it’s impossible for your readers to judge whether the comparison actually means anything.
4) A lot or alot?
I must confess to being a habitual “alot” user – until I knew better. It was a sad (not to mention embarrassing) day when I discovered that “alot” is not actually a real word. If you’re trying to say that someone has a vast amount of clothes, you’d say they have a lot of clothes. And if you’re trying to say that you’ve set aside a certain amount of money to buy, say, groceries you’d say you’ve allotted £50 to spend on food.
Go on, own up. How many are you guilty of?
Remember, if you need professional help writing clear, correct copy give Melanie Silver a call on 01923 212048.
With grateful acknowledgement of Hub Spot’s contributions to this post
