Free How to Not Write Bad: The Most Common Writing Problems and the Best Ways to Avoidthem by Ben Yagoda Page A

the boss and nothing I say or write can change that. Still, you have my permission to wave this section in the air and protest that you read in a book that it’s perfectly acceptable to:
    a. End a Sentence with a Preposition
    Who are you going to the movies with?
(But see III.C.7 .)
    b. Use
Who
Instead of
Whom
in the Objective Case
    Who are you going to the movies with?
    The exception is immediately following a preposition:
To whom should I send the customer-satisfaction survey?
    c. Use Objective Rather than Subjective Pronouns in Comparisons, Following the Verb
to Be
, and in First-Person Plural
    They have a bigger house than us.
(Alternatively:
than we do.
)
    Hello, it’s me.
    We are all at the mercy of Mother Nature. But especially us astronomers.
    d. Judiciously Split Infinitives
    To avoid damaging the wall, you
carefully
have to carefully hold the picture hook and hammer it in.
    e. (And Similarly) Break up a Compound Verb with an Adverb
    He has frequently woken up
frequently
in the morning with no idea where he spent the night.
    f. Use
Like
(I)
    This little word, depending on the way it’s used, can be alternately sanitized, skunked, and still wrong. (And that’s not even getting into the way young people famously use it in conversation, as a filler [“I’m, like, tired”] or indicator of attribution [“He was like, ‘Why aren’t you going to the concert?’”]. Even young people know enough not to use it this way in formal writing.)
    It wasn’t necessarily always the case, but it’s now okay to use
like:
    As a synonym for
such as.
    We read authors like Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald.
    To introduce a clause where a verb is omitted.
    He takes to engineering like a duck [takes] to water.
    He speaks French like a native [does].
    It has never been wrong or even suspect to use
like
in a sentence like:
    Like Paris, Rome has an almost unlimited number of world-class restaurants.
    However, some people are gun-shy about
like
and engage in the hoity toity lingo that’s called “hypercorrection.”
    [
In common with Paris, Rome has an almost unlimited number of world-class restaurants.
]
    Actually,
in common with
is called for in only one situation: sentences like
Bill and Paul have lot in common.
    g. Use a Plural Verb with a Collective Noun
    A number of objections
comes
come to mind.
    In the above sentence, the plural
come
is better than the singular
comes,
even though (singular)
number
is ostensibly the subject of the sentence. That’s because the emphasis is on
objections.
By thesame logic, if the emphasis is on the singular collective, the singular verb is preferable:
    Just one battalion of soldiers
were
was sent to the front.
    A bucket of worms
were
was on top of the bench.
    He was one of the employees who
was
were given an award at the ceremony.
    Often, it could go either way, as in this pair:
    A scrum of applicants was hovering outside the office door by 7
a.m.
A scrum of applicants were hovering outside the office door by 7
a.m.
    Which do you prefer? I would go with 2.
    2. SKUNKED
    As with words, certain grammatical constructions are considered okay by some or most authorities but retain an offensive odor for many readers (and, crucially, teachers and editors), and should be avoided. This shouldn’t present a problem, since they’re usually not difficult to replace with the correct form.
    a. First-Person First
    [
I and Matt will be collecting tickets for the concert.
]
    Matt and I will be collecting tickets for the concert.
    b. Like (II)
    Some have argued that the 1950s ad slogan “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” started the modern prescriptivist movement. In any case, things have gotten to the point where using
like
instead of
as, as if,
or
as though
is widely accepted. But it still could get you in hot water in certain quarters.
    [
He looked like he really wanted to jump into the pool.
]
    He looked as though he really wanted to jump into the pool.

    [
Like the professor said,