How to Write Correct English 8

STARTING TO WRITE ENGLISH WITH NO MISTAKES: Module Eight

JIM LAWLEY & RUBEN CHACÓN BELTRÁN | © 2015 1

How to write correct English: Module Eight Video The problem is that many people have 'fossilised errors': incorrect uses which are

becoming a part of what they write. Here is an example:

"This books are interesting ..."

Probably lots of people seeing that sentence will detect the error immediately (it should

be: "These books are interesting ..."). But this is a common mistake because the words this

and these sound so similar. That’s why this books sounds right to a lot of people. It’s

easy to spot the error here because the sentence only contains 4 words and because I told

you that there is a mistake. But how to find a mistake when it’s in the middle of a long

essay that you wrote?

How can the person who wrote, "This books are interesting ..." spot the error? That's the

problem! After all, that person wrote This books because they think it is correct – they

didn't make the mistake on purpose!

After writing an essay of 250 words you might spend perhaps two hours self-correcting it.

You should take the view that a lot of what you wrote might be incorrect. So ask yourself

about each sentence: "Am I sure that is correct? What evidence do I have?"

If your name is Ana and you have written the sentence 'My name is Ana', then you can

be sure it's correct because you have seen sentences like 'My name is Julie' and 'My

name is John' in books that you know are written in correct English. If you think hard you

can feel that you have a good reason – it's a very common structure which you know

you know.

That is the important point: use sentences that you know are correct as models for your

own writing. If you have any doubts, where can you find such sentences? In the dictionary.

If you look up the word this in the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, you will

find that the entry makes very clear with explanations and examples that this is used

before singular nouns and these before plural nouns. Indeed, there is even an example

which starts like this:

These books are ...

I've chosen a very simple example here. But the same goes for other words. For

example, if you have used a preposition after a verb, is it the right preposition?

(Prepositions are a notorious source of error). If you have used another verb after a verb,

is the second verb in the right form? Should it be the infinitive or the -ing form?

At first it seems a lot of time – and it is – but it is very efficient use of your time

because you are checking YOUR English, the English you like to use. You will soon

find that you don't need to check so much – because you know you know. That is, you are



building up a body of English phrases and structures which you can use with confidence.

Now I want to introduce you to a tool that will help you a lot. The British National Corpus.

The British National Corpus is a huge online corpus of correct English. A corpus is

a large collection of texts which is held on computer and can therefore be accessed

electronically. And in the case of The British National Corpus you can access it online.

The British National Corpus contains the texts (but not the pictures or photographs) found

in lots of newspapers, periodicals, journals, novels and non-fiction books, letters and

messages, essays, etcetera and the transcripts of lectures, casual everyday conversations,

and radio programmes. All this language (the novels, newspapers, conversations etc) was

produced in the later part of the 20th century. In total the corpus contains approximately

100 million words.

What can we do with such a corpus?

Well if you go to

http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/

You will see a box where it says “Enter text”. There you can write a word or phrase. Let’s

say we write depend. We click on “Go” and then you will see a page that starts like

this:

Your query was depend

Here is a random selection of 50 solutions from the 3448 found. And below this notice are 50 examples of depend in sentences from the corpus. There

are 3448 examples of depend and 50 of them are shown to you. They are shown to you

in context – in the sentences from books and newspapers for example which form part

of the corpus. Here is an example – one of the uses of depend in the corpus:

A64 470 Local involvement in nation-wide politics does not just depend on

intellectual evolution, however, but on the strong conviction that national affairs

affect one's life and so need to be considered. If you click on A64 you see this.

A64 One step backwards, two steps forward. Pethybridge, Roger. Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1990, pp. ??. 1797 s-units, 41009 words.





This tells you where the sentence comes from. As you can see, it comes from a book called

One step backwards, two steps forward. It is often useful to know where the sentence

comes from. If it is a published book then you know that it has been carefully written and

carefully edited. That’s important for us on this course because we want to be sure that

we are using good models – models we can rely on. Reliable examples.

The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words but ten million

words of that is spoken English. Now, spoken English is not such a good guide to

written English. In spoken English people make mistakes, they change direction in the

middle of the sentence, they stop and then they start again, they talk in a way that is OK

for talking but not for writing where there are different rules. So remember, if you are

using the British National Corpus to check if a phrase is correct in writing, you need to

find evidence in written texts. Remember you can tell where the phrase comes from by

clicking on the letters and numbers – A64 for example – which appear in blue on the

left just before the sentence.

If later you repeat this exercise you will get a different selection of 50 examples of depend.

And don’t forget that you can also get examples of depends and depended and depending

…

And if you want, you can also write a phrase; for example, depends of. If you do that

you discover that the phrase depends of occurs ten times in the 100 million words. Here is

an example:

It all depends of course on what is meant by ‘the feminine’.

Ah! Earlier in the course we decided that depends of was wrong – and it was wrong in the

sentence we were looking at, but here we see that there are exceptions. And this is very

normal. The British National Corpus contains approximately 100 million words; that’s

a lot of language. There are lots of things that you wouldn’t have thought were possible –

until you see them. For example, if you ask English speakers if you can use of after

depend they will probably say “no”. Until you say, “And what about it depends of course

on the weather?”. And then they say “Oh yes, I hadn’t thought of that ….”

But remember; just because a phrase in your writing also occurs in the British National

Corpus doesn’t mean that you have used it correctly. Ideally, you need to see the phrase

used by two or three writers in just the way you want to use it.

Now here is the task for this module. I want you to look at this sentence:

Then he said us he had always worked as waiter.

Now, there are two mistakes in that sentence. You can probably see them immediately but

finding the errors is not the task – or not yet anyway. Now, we can divide that sentence

into pairs of words: Then he, he said, said us, us he, he had, had always, always

worked, worked as, as waiter. That’s nine pairs. Notice that most of the words form part

of two pairs: he is the second word in Then he and the first word in he said, for example.



You can look up each pair in the British National Corpus and see how often it occurs.

For example, the pair Then he occurs 5890 times, and the pair he said occurs 34,737 times.

Your task is to find the numbers for all nine pairs. Which are the two lowest numbers?

Where are the two mistakes in the sentence? As usual, if you have any doubts, then the

forum is the place to discuss this.

(Data cited herein have been extracted from the British National Corpus Online service, managed by Oxford University Computing Services on behalf of the BNC Consortium. All rights in the texts cited are reserved.)

How to Write Correct English 8

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