flexibeast.space - gemlog - 2021-02-28

Some common ungrammatical/unidiomatic uses of English

i'm a native speaker of English, and in my travels online, there are a few ungrammatical/unidiomatic uses of English that keep cropping up. i usually don't draw attention to them, for two reasons:

• It feels derailing and unnecessary to do so, since most of the time the writer's intended semantics are clear.
• At the point where these are the only things that stand out to me in a non-native speaker's writing, that person's English is far better than my competence in any of the non-English languages with which i have some basic familiarity.

So i've decided to just write an ‘FYI’ post instead. :-)

Writing:

Setting this allows to save the document in other formats.

isn't gramatically correct. Two possible alternatives here are:

Setting this allows [one|you] to save the document in other formats.

or

Setting this allows saving the document in other formats.

In most of the contexts i've encountered this, the more appropriate word would be ‘question’ rather than ‘doubt’. For example, instead of:

I've been learning to use X, and I have a doubt. How do I do Y?

i'd suggest:

I've been learning to use X, and I have a question. How do I do Y?

‘Doubt’ is more appropriately used when you're not sure if X is the case:

I've been told X is the best software for my use-case, but I have some doubts.

This isn't idiomatic; use “like this:” instead. For example, instead of:

In gemtext, blockquotes are indicated by a greater-than symbol, like that: '>'

write:

In gemtext, blockquotes are indicated by a greater-than symbol, like this: '>'

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