Here’s a quick tour of some writing specifics that can trip you up. English is full of quirks waiting to pounce! And not least on the TTRPG creator or boardgame rules writer.
That and which. These are not interchangeable; at least, not as much as you might think. ‘That’ is for declaring and defining, and you use it for things that are part of the essential meaning of the sentence. ‘The bag that I brought with me is heavy.’ In contrast, ‘which’ is for giving extra information that isn’t essential, like an aside. ‘The bag, which I brought with me, is heavy.’ So most of the time you want ‘that’. (Of course ‘which’ is also a question word, and has other uses around identifying specifics.)
Onto and into. In US English use ‘onto’, but not in British English: we always make it separate as ‘on to’, even though we’re happy with ‘into’. Bear in mind the difference between ‘into’, for moving into a space or looking into a space or object, and ‘in to’ for most other uses.
Beware phonetics. When people encounter a written word they don’t know, they tend to write it the way it sounds. As English has famously mugged many other languages to become a shambling assemblage of parts, that doesn’t always work. Better to be in the habit of looking things up. Case in point: ‘should’ve’ (and its cousins), which is an abbreviation of ‘should have’, but sometimes gets written as ‘should of’.
Lead and led. The past tense of the verb ‘to lead’ is ‘led’ — ‘Yesterday I led the horse to water.’ The version of ‘lead’ that sounds like ‘led’ is the heavy metal \m/.
Principal and principle. ‘Principal’ means primary, main, important. It can be the head of a college, a sum you invest, or the core reason for doing something. ‘Principle’ is a rule or underpinning, whether ethical or factual (like the key principles of how magic works).
Off of. This is common in US speech particularly. In the more formal space of writing you’d just use ‘off’, as the ‘of’ isn’t doing any work and it sounds repetitious. You might use it when quoting a character’s speech, to keep some flavour but not overdo it.
Repetition. This isn’t specific to a word or phrase, but one of the things I spot when editing is a word cropping up multiple times close together. ‘That’ is a common offender. Repetition can become obtrusive or trigger boredom in the reader, so it’s good to rephrase some of those instances using different words.
And I or me? Split it up and see which sounds right. ‘The king and me went to the park’ becomes ‘The king went to the park’ and ‘Me went to the park’ — so that should have been ‘I’.
Foreword. The words that go before the main text. Not ‘forward’ (even though it sounds the same) or the unholy hybrid ‘foreward’.
All toothpastes are not the same. That actually means no toothpastes are the same. To say that some things are different, you need ‘Not all toothpastes are the same.’
Grammar rules that aren’t. Some teachers used to frame these as never-dos, but they can be used if you apply judgment. The split infinitive, like ‘To boldly go’, is sometimes the most effective order — and people can tie themselves in knots using worse versions like ‘Boldly to go’. Similarly, it’s fine to start a sentence with ‘And’ or ‘But’ occasionally. If you overuse any of these it’ll make your text sound odd, so apply them for effect.
Number agreement. This can be a tricky one. When you’re talking about a group of people (or other creatures), is it singular or plural? For an organisation, like the council or Greedcorp, it’s a single entity, so other words in the sentence should agree: ‘the council has said’ rather than ‘the council have said’. In speech we blur these lines all the time and it feels natural. You might want to flex it in writing too. The absolute baseline is that you should have number agreement within the same sentence: so not ‘The council has said that they will act immediately.’
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