Assure/Ensure/Insure
Three little words — assure, ensure and insure — can wreak havoc in writing. Consider:
My two-volume 1937 Webster’s Universal Dictionary of the English Language, “profusely illustrated, being the unabridged dictionary by Noah Webster, LL.D.,” defines
- assure as To make certain.
- ensure as Same as insure.
- insure as To underwrite.
But today Ensure means an adult nutrition shake. The word makes reasonable people snicker. I suggest you drop it from business writing. Totally.
Write insure when you’re discussing property liability and annual check-ups.
Use assure to mean “put the mind to rest.”
What do you think?
Write short sentences
Q. What’s the shortest sentence?
Write sentences in 20 or fewer words.
- To state you point concisely.
- To keep your readers’ attention.
- To help your readers understand.
Write occasional sentences of 10 or fewer words. Or of one or two or three words. If you use too many words, separating the subject from its verb, readers have to hunt for them. Then they have to string your sentence back together for you. How often are they likely to do that?
According to the federal government, you should “Express only one idea in each sentence.” Shorter sentences are also better for conveying complex information; they break the information up into smaller, easier-to-process units. Sentences loaded with dependent clauses and exceptions confuse the reader by losing the main point in a forest of words. Resist the temptation to put everything in one sentence; break up your idea into its parts and make each one the subject of its own sentence.”
Read more at plainlanguage.gov.
Tip: Long sentences are for hardened criminals, not for you.
A. I do.
Loving your words
In a writing workshop in Philadelphia Writers Group, we read Rose’s manuscript. Three members of the group advised Rose to kill a particular sentence, but Rose kept saying she liked it. Finally Carol suggested that Rose move the sentence to the bottom of the document and write the piece without it. If, when she finished writing, she still wanted the sentence, she could find it patiently waiting at the end of the last page. Wise advice.
That’s a technique I often use – moving, but not dumping – words or sentences that I have written but probably don’t need to keep.
Try it.
Justice Scalia teaches word usage
The American Bar Association’s online ABA Journal published this English lesson November 4, 2009:
A lawyer for a company that sells tax-free cigarettes over the internet got a lesson on word usage from Justice Antonin Scalia. Lawyer Randolph Barnhouse described an opportunity to collect tax money as an inchoate interest – an interest that is not yet fully formed, the Associated Press reported.
Barnhouse argued that a city government may not bring a RICO suit to recover uncollected taxes because a lost tax opportunity is not an injury to property covered by the statute.
Barnhouse spoke of a choate interest in property – to Scalia’s dismay. “There is no such adjective,” Scalia said. “I know we have used it, but there is no such adjective as choate. There is inchoate, but the opposite of inchoate is not choate. It’s like gruntled.”
“But I think I am right on the law, Your Honor,” Barnhouse said.
“Exactly. Disgruntled,” Scalia said. “Some people mistakenly assume the opposite of disgruntled is gruntled.”
For more detail, click here.
Writing truthiness?
Coming home on a plane, I sit next to a man wearing shorts, sneakers but no socks, and a clean, white t-shirt. He has rolled the sleeves several times, the left one neatly holding his sunglasses.
He carries nothing. No Wired, no Blackberry, no Stephen King, no headset playing heavy metal. Nothing to occupy his mind during the four-hour flight. His lack of mental diversion fascinates me. For a while, as I read, I sneak glances at his countenance, expecting boredom or intelligence or something. Nothing is there.
Eventually I lose interest. As I take out my notebook to jot some ideas, my seatmate perks up and commences to talk. You a writer?” Well, yes, although even surgeons and street-sweepers sometimes write and could conceivably carry notebooks. “My girlfriend’s a school teacher. She writes sometimes. What do you write?”
“Non-fiction, mostly for businesses.”
“I forget. Is that the true or the not-true? My girlfriend would know, but I always forget.”
The hairy, bare-legged man fascinates me again, not for his silence but for his contribution.
