H.P. Lovecraft’s list of 20 mistakes young writers make
Over the years H.P. Lovecraft’s image in our head has been clouded with doubts like “Was he actually a good writer?” and “He was a bigot?”. But still few of us would challenge his position as an inventor of prose, and his contribution to the genre of weird fiction/ horror fiction remains invaluable.
So we stumbled upon this essay by Lovecraft called “Literary Composition” and plucked out a list of 20 common “mistakes” that he thinks we could avoid in our writing.
How many of them do you make every day?
(1) Erroneous plurals of nouns, as vallies or echos.
(2) Barbarous compound nouns, as viewpoint or upkeep.
(3) Want of correspondence in number between noun and verb where the two are widely separated or the construction involved.
(4) Ambiguous use of pronouns.
(5) Erroneous case of pronouns, as whom for who, and vice versa, or phrases like “between you and I”, or “Let we who are loyal, act promptly.”
(6) Erroneous use of shall and will, and of other auxiliary verbs.
(7) Use of intransitive for transitive verbs, as “he was graduated from college”, or vice versa, as “he ingratiated with the tyrant”.
(8) Use of nouns for verbs, as “he motored to Boston”, or “he voiced a protest”.
(9) Errors in moods and tenses of verbs, as “If I was he, I should do otherwise”, or “He said the earth was round.”
(10) The split infinitive, as “to calmly glide”.
(11) The erroneous perfect infinitive, as “Last week I expected to have met you.”
(12) False verb-forms, as “I pled with him.”
(13) Use of like for as, as “I strive to write like Pope wrote.”
(14) Misuse of prepositions, as “The gift was bestowed to an unworthy object”, or “The gold was divided between the five men.”
(15) The superfluous conjunction, as “I wish for you to do this.”
(16) Use of words in wrong senses, as “The book greatly intrigued me”, “Leave me take this”, “He was obsessed with the idea”, or “He is a meticulous writer.”
(17) Erroneous use of non-Anglicised foreign forms, as “a strange phenomena”, or “two stratas of clouds”.
(18) Use of false or unauthorised words, as burglarise or supremest.
(19) Errors of taste, including vulgarisms, pompousness, repetition, vagueness, ambiguousness, colloquialism, bathos, bombast, pleonasm, tautology, harshness, mixed metaphor, and every sort of rhetorical awkwardness.
(20) Errors of spelling and punctuation, and confusion of forms such as that which leads many to place an apostrophe in the possessive pronoun its.