This is easy! Fixing these five commonly misused words will immediately improve your academic writing.

1. Latter

The word latter does not mean ‘the last item in a list’. It means ‘the second of two items’.

🗴  American spellings are color, honor, and traveling. The latter has a single L, whereas British English has two Ls.

✓  American spellings are color, honor, and traveling. The last of these has a single L, whereas British English has two Ls.

2. Preposition on

The preposition on is increasingly misused. A common misuse is to write “knowledge on something”. That should be “knowledge of something”. Note, you can correctly say, “The speaker had extensive knowledge of psychology and spoke on the subject of heuristics.”

3. Preposition where

As with on, where seems to be taking over and is put to nefarious uses. The most glaring error is to use where when when is appropriate. Consider these cases of incorrect usage:

🗴  The Elizabethan era was where English literature flourished.

🗴  There are times where institutional knowledge is integrated.

Apple this rule: use where for locations in space; use when for locations in time.

4. Respectively

Use respectively to show correspondence between list items. Do not simply append it to lists. The Lexico dictionary defines respectively as: “Separately or individually and in the order already mentioned (used when enumerating two or more items or facts that refer back to a previous statement)”.

✓  The 2020 GDPs of Germany, the UK, and France were $3.8-trillion, $2.7-trillion, and $2.6-trillion, respectively.

In the above sentence, respectively tells you which countries and GDP figures go together (Germany with $3.8-trillion, the UK with $2.7-trillion, and France with $2.6-trillion). In the sentence below, no pairing is necessary and respectively serves no function.

🗴  In 2020, the European countries with the highest GDPs were Germany, the UK, and France, respectively.

Taking this one step further, consider omitting respectively even when there is correspondence. Consider the statement:

Hypothesis 3 and Hypothesis 4 examined implicit and explicit attitudinal changes, respectively.

With this sentence, it is unlikely the reader will misconstrue this statement if respectively were omitted.

5. Eg and ie

The abbreviations ie and eg are often confused. The abbreviation ie means that is and eg means for example. How to remember which is which? Easy. Do not use them at all. Moreover, should you write i.e. and e.g. or omit the full stops? Easy. Do not use them at all. Use the full forms that is and for example.

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