February Grammar Goofs

19 February, 2013

This month is about love. How do you create insurance marketing pieces that your prospects will love? With you-oriented, helpful content that is free of grammatical errors. Below, you’ll find some valuable guidance on two very common writing mistakes.

Mistake #1: i.e versus e.g. 

One of our favorite language enthusiasts, Grammar Girl (a.k.a. Mignon Fogarty, author of several writing manuals, including "Grammar Girl's Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing"), says the misuse of these two abbreviations is one of the top five mistakes she witnessed in her previous life as a technical editor.

"There's so much confusion that in some of the drafts I got back from clients they had actually crossed out the right abbreviation and replaced it with the wrong one," she writes on her blog.

Both are abbreviations for Latin terms (i.e. stands for "id est"; e.g. is short for "exempli gratia"), and good luck remembering that. Translated, "id est" means "that is" and "exempli gratia" means "for example."

Grammar Girl offers this trick: "From now on, i.e., which starts with i, means 'in other words,' and e.g., which starts with e, means 'for example.'  I = in other words. E= example."

Mistake #2: Which versus that. 

"That" is restrictive and essential to convey the meaning of a sentence. "Which" is non-restrictive and often introduces a non-essential clause. Consider the following example from World Wide Words (worldwidewords.org). 

  • The house that is painted pink has just been sold.
  • The house, which is painted pink, has just been sold.

"The clause 'that is painted pink' is a restrictive clause, because it limits the scope of the word 'house,' indicating that the writer doesn't mean any house, only the one that has been painted in that particular color," writes World Wide Words' Michael Quinion. "In the second example the clause is non-restrictive: the writer is giving additional information about a house he's describing. The writer is saying 'by the way, the house is painted pink,' as an additional bit of information that's not essential to the meaning and could be taken out."