‘Effect’ vs. ‘affect’ in English

Both “effect” and “affect” can be used as a noun or as a verb. If you have found this page using a search engine, the odds are that if you want to use a noun, you want to say “effect”, as in “it has a negligible effect on me”, and if you want to use a verb, you want to say “affect”, as in “it affected me negatively”.

“To effect something” means “to implement something”; for example, one can “effect political changes”. “An affect” (pronounced /ˈæfɛkt/) is a term used in psychology to mean a subjective feeling experienced in response to a stimulus.

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‘Etc.’ after ‘e.g.’ in English

The abbreviation “e.g.” (pronounced /iːdʒiː/) comes from the Latin phrase exemplī grātiā which means “for example” or, more precisely, “for the sake of example”. It implies that an incomplete list of examples follows, as in:

Some rather surprising kinds of fruit are considered to be “berries”, e.g. bananas, avocados, pumpkins.

Another common Latin abbreviation is “etc.” (et cetera, pronounced /ˌɛtˈsɛtərə/) which means “and the rest” or “and so forth”. Many people write “etc.” at the end of a list introduced by “e.g.”, but this is superfluous (and is therefore often considered bad style), since “e.g.” already implies that the list that follows is incomplete.

It may even be considered incorrect to write “etc.” after “e.g.” in some situations because “etc.” implies that it is obvious how to continue the list, as in the sentence:

Possible solutions are x = 5, 10, 15, 20, etc.

The “etc.” was appropriate here, as it is obvious that the list would continue as “25, 30, …”. On the other hand, “etc.” would be inappropriate in our previous fruity example because it is not obvious what other items are supposed to be on the list:

Some rather surprising kinds of fruit are considered to be “berries”, e.g. bananas, avocados, pumpkins, etc. [incorrect – what else?]

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Comma before and after ‘etc.’

Should you use a comma before and/or after “etc.”? There’s no definitive answer, because different style guides recommend different usage.

Nevertheless, the style that seems to be recommended the most is to always include a comma before “etc.”; it is recommended even by those who discourage the use of the Oxford comma (the comma before the last item in a list). (Note: This article is based on my book about the most common mistakes in English.) For example:

He bought some apples, oranges, grapefruits, etc.

If “etc.” is not the last part of the sentence, it is to be followed by a comma:

He bought some apples, oranges, grapefruits, etc., for his fruit salad.

Some sources recommend not using any comma at all, but these are much less numerous than for the previous use:

He bought some apples, oranges, grapefruits etc. for his fruit salad.

Note, however, that the period after “etc” should always be included. Writing just “etc” is almost universally considered bad style.

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‘On the Internet’ vs. ‘in the Internet’, capital I

Prepositions are a common source of mistakes for learners of any language. The word “Internet” is especially problematic for an English learner because it can cause several problems at once. First, when it is used as a noun describing the network we all use, it is used with the definite article:

I love the Internet! (correct)
I love Internet! (dubious)

I wrote “dubious” instead of “wrong” for the second option because some native speakers do use the noun without the article.

However, most English speakers consider the first option to be the only correct one, so it is the one you should use.

The word “Internet” isn’t preceded by an article when it is used as an adjective in front of a noun that itself takes no article, e.g.

Do you have Internet access? (correct)
Do you have the Internet access? (wrong)

The term “Internet access” is sometimes shortened to “Internet”, in which case we don’t use an article:

Do you have Internet? (correct)
Do you have the Internet? (wrong)

The second sentence doesn’t make sense; you can’t own the Internet, but you can have Internet in the sense of Internet access.

Another problem is the preposition. When something is part of the Internet, we say that it is “on the Internet”, not “in” or “at” the Internet:

I didn’t find the article on the Internet. (correct)
I didn’t find the article in the Internet. (wrong)

As for whether you should capitalize “Internet”: It’s hard to make a mistake here. Both “Internet” and “internet” are commonly used when referring to the network. Traditionally, “Internet” was considered a proper noun and written with a capital letter. Nowadays, the noun is considered to be a generic name, like “electricity” or “water supply”, and is commonly spelled “internet”, so:

You can surf the Internet. (correct, more traditional)
You can also surf the internet. (correct, more recent)

Some style guides prefer one spelling to the other, so if you are writing a text for someone else, you may want to check which style guide they follow.

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So, thus, therefore, and hence in English

Since you are reading this article in English, the odds are you already know what the conjunction “so” means. You probably also know that “thus”, “therefore”, and “hence” mean basically the same as “so” but are not completely equivalent, and you are wondering what the difference is. If this is the case, this article is just for you.

Before moving on to the particular words, it should be noted that “thus”, “therefore”, and “hence” are all rather formal and much more common in writing than in everyday conversation.

Thus

The most important difference between “thus” and “so” is that “so” is a conjunction (meaning “and for that reason”, “and because of that”), whereas “thus” is an adverb (synonymous to “consequently”). For example, the sentence

He is not satisfied with our work, so we must prepare a new proposal.

can be rewritten using “thus” thus:

He is not satisfied with our work. Thus, we must prepare a new proposal.

He is not satisfied with our work; thus, we must prepare a new proposal.

He is not satisfied with our work, and thus we must prepare a new proposal.

He is not satisfied with our work, thus we must prepare a new proposal.

The last example is not correct because “thus” cannot join two independent clauses. “Thus” also has another meaning, which I used in the last sentence above the examples: “in this way”, “like this”. For example:

They have developed a new technology, thus allowing them to reduce costs.

Notice that the comma here was appropriate because what follows is not a clause (there is no verb in the second part of the sentence).

Hence

Just like “thus”, “hence” is an adverb, not a conjunction, so it cannot join two independent clauses (note that it is more common to omit the comma after “hence” than after “thus” in formal writing):

They are not satisfied with our work. Hence we must prepare a new proposal.

They are not satisfied with our work; hence, we must prepare a new proposal.

They are not satisfied with our work, hence we must prepare a new proposal.

“Hence” used in this sense is uncommon, and the usage persists mostly in specialized fields, such as scientific writing.

There is, however, another, more common meaning of “hence”, which substitutes a verb:

Our server was down, hence the delay in responding.

The chemicals cause the rain to become acidic, hence the term “acid rain”.

As you can see, “hence” expresses the idea of “which leads to”, “and that is the reason of”.

Therefore

Finally, “therefore” is also an adverb meaning “as a logical consequence”. It is used mostly in argumentation when one statement logically follows from another, and it is common on scientific literature:

The two lines have exactly one common point; therefore they are not parallel.

The two lines have exactly one common point, therefore they are not parallel.

“Therefore” doesn’t sound natural when there is no apparent logical connection between the two statements; in this case, you should use “so”:

My trip to Paris was cancelled, so I visited my grandma instead.

My trip to Paris was cancelled; therefore, I visited my grandma instead.

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Why are English words so short?

Being a user (and a passive reader) of several languages, I’ve noticed that English words tend to be shorter on average than words in other languages. I believe the reason for that is twofold:

English is a fairly isolating language

Being “isolating” is a linguistic term that means, simply put, that the number of “pieces of information” per word is very low. To understand what a “piece of information is”, let’s take a look at the word “unlawful”. The word “law” carries just one piece of information, “lawful” carries two (“by law”), “unlawful” carries three (“not by law”). English lacks the following “non-isolating” constructions commonly found in other languages:

CASE ENDINGS. Slavic languages, for instance, have an elaborate system of case endings, thanks to which it is often possible to add an ending to a noun instead of using a preposition. For example, “a tent” would be stan in Czech (there are no articles in Czech, so “a” is implied), “to a tent” would be stanu, and “by a tent” would be stanem. As you can see, we use three short words in English for what would be just one longer word in Czech.

VERB ENDINGS. A similar trend can be observed in verbs. “To speak” is hablar in Spanish and mluvit in Czech; the -r in Spanish and -t in Czech already indicates it is an infinitive. In English, we have to use the short word “to” to make this clear. If we want to say “I will speak” in Spanish, we can say simply hablaré—the -aré ending already carries the necessary information about the subject and the tense. Similarly, in Czech, we can say promluvím; “pro-” puts it in the future and “-ím” indicates the subject is “I”. In summary, we have to use three short words in English in a place where we would use just one longer word in Spanish or Czech.

PHRASAL VERBS. There are important differences in the way new “meanings” are formed from the words we already have. In English, there are a lot of phrasal verbs like “go off”, “look after”, “show up”, etc., and not so many verbs formed using a prefix (e.g. “overlook”, “upset”). This is not the case in other European languages where “phrasal verbs” are usually formed by adding a prefix, so the three mentioned would be something like “offgo”, “afterlook”, and “upshow” (of course, there’s often little logic in these, so the literal translation of the two parts into another language would almost never work, but I hope it illustrates the general idea).

German is actually somewhere in between English and other languages in that respect. In certain positions, the “prefix” is a separate word, in others, it isn’t. For example ich nehme an means “I suppose” (literally “I take on”) and ich muss annehmenmeans “I must suppose” (literally “I must ontake”). However, considering we can stick nouns together in German almost freely, this little feature doesn’t really matter in terms of the overall impression of word length.

COMPOUND WORDS. And so we come to the last important difference between English and German. There are a relatively modest number of compound words in English, like ear⋅ring, foot⋅print, or sun⋅light. Or is it?

In fact, the difference between English and German in terms of long compound nouns is mostly typographical. English speakers just like to write compound words separately; we write “university student” instead of “universitystudent” (Hochschulstudent), “house cleaning” instead of “housecleaning” (Wohnungsreinigung), and “back pain” instead of “backpain” (Rückenschmerz). Call the first word in the pair what you will (you may say it acts as an adjective or that it is simply a noun used as a modifier), but the structure is completely the same as in German; Germans just don’t write the spaces in between.

English is very open to abbreviations

Users of English have a tendency to shorten words. While we may cringe at the word “cuz” some people use to abbreviate “because”, the tendency to treat abbreviations as full-fledged words has been there for centuries. To name just a few well established one:

• advertisement
• brassiere
• examination
• influenza
• refrigerator (spelled fridge)
• gasoline
• telephone
• airplane
• necktie

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