What's Standard English? Part 3: Over / More Than

In the 1990s, an editor returned one of my articles with a correction. She replaced over with more than in the sentence "Over 1,500 students attend that high school." Even three decades ago, over was in use by pretty much everyone in such contexts. Grateful that my editor accepted my article for publication, I decided not to argue with her over this small point. I did not want to tell her that over has been in use in the English lexicon for more than a millennium.

Grammatical purists seem pleased to put speakers and writers in a linguistic straitjacket with rules that have lain dead for a long time. They fail to consider three historical facts:

1. Language evolution is natural. For cultural, social, biological, and technological reasons, language changes. The world gets smaller, thanks to globalization and technology, so our loan words from other languages increase. Our ability, or inability, to properly pronounce words, such as the Philippine English gigil, now a standard English word, can change the way we spell it.

2. The difference between spoken and written language diminishes over time. Consider the grammatical marker that, as in I know that you know. Our elementary writing teachers would insist on using that in the sentence. But in speech, saying I know you know sounds fine. In time, dropping that in this sentence becomes the accepted writing standard.

3. Usage challenges have a long history. Upon researching etymology, you learn that every word is subject to changes that embellish, diminish, or eliminate them from the language. 

If you ever get called out for using over instead of more than, don't be like me back in the 1990s. Fight back. Believe me: over has been acceptable for over a thousand years.

What's Standard English? Part 2: Salutations

I have written about salutations on one or two occasions in the 21-year history of WORDS ON THE LINE because the topic remains popular among learners in my writing workshops and webinars and readers of this blog. I revisit salutations to show how standards change, which is the focus of this series.

In a post from 17 years ago, I mentioned that commonsense should dictate how you address executives, managers, supervisors, teammates, clients, and vendors. A later post 8 years ago suggested that you should let your organizational culture dictate how you address readers in your emails.

But the point here is we have gone a long way from the medieval "peace be with you, brother" for several reasons, one of them being that for centuries women too have been readers of messages. Another reason is the secularization of the workplace. Technology has also contributed to the need for shortcuts, and globalization has forced our hand to address people politely to compensate for our intentions getting lost in linguistic and cultural translations.

By the nineteenth century, we saw "Dear Sir" or "Dear Madam" become the standard. Then came email, which revolutionized the salutation to "Hi," "Hello," "Greetings," "Good morning," or "Good day" replacing the "Dear," and in most contexts first names replacing last names. Less formality. Then came the complete removal of "Mr." and "Ms." in deference to gender fluidity. Now we address people by their given and surnames, as in "Hi Max Friedman."

Still the questions persist: Is "Dear" in a salutation dead? Is it ever all right to write "Mr." or "Ms."? What if my organization is not as progressive about salutations? The two posts I mention in the second paragraph still hold true, yet no one can reasonably say only one salutation is right. It all comes down to a personal choice.

What's Standard English? Part 1: Overview

It's getting harder to decide what is Standard English today. The global view of this topic is that Standard English is British English, taught throughout Europe, Africa, Australia, and most of the Asia and the English-speaking Caribbean, while American English is taught in the United States, some of Asia, South America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.

But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm considering what we practice around the world as opposed to what we learned was proper English. In the business world, writers are pushing back against what constitutes a correct sentence, acceptable diction, and customary punctuation. I see comma splices especially becoming commonplace, writers assigning new meanings to everyday words, and new words not only flooding emails but pouring into dictionaries as acceptable usage. I'm beginning to see more violations of the norm than the norm. If that's true, then aren't the violations the norm? 

In this series, I will explore writing "standards" that most people ignore, whether they are driven by factors such as stylistic preferences, time constraints, or globalization and technology. There are many.

GenAI Summit Is Coming Soon

Providing financial services that educate the customer is a desired outcome of all banks, but when does that education slide into information overload? How does a financial advisor strike the delicate balance between exuding customer-centered transparency while still maintaining legally required client confidentiality? When does the unyielding due diligence required of financial analysis depart from reasonable flexibility? These questions have been challenging the industry since First Bank opened in 1791 during the George Washington Administration. 

Multiply these concerns by infinity because of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI)! Sure, you can bet your assets that GenAI will be always more efficient, usually more comprehensive, and occasionally more rigorous than the best human researcher. But the problems GenAI poses, from downright refusing information requests to generating hallucinations, or seemingly credible lies, lays a crucible on the industry unlike any other.

The response to these conundrums is not easy, but you've got to start somewhere. A smart launching point would be the all-day AI in Banking Summit, presented by OnCourseLearning, on Wednesday, June 3, from 9:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. During that time, speakers (including me) will deliver six presentations ranging from 30 to 45 minutes over five hours on a wide range of topics merging banking concerns with the powerful, transformative force of GenAI. Do not miss it. You can register here.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 7: Concerns

The last six posts covered general and specific concerns about depending on AI throughout the writing process. Do I find AI useful to plan, draft, revise, edit, and proofread? Yes. Do I trust AI completely? No. The previous posts explain why. 

In closing this series, I share insights based on AI research in business, law, science, psychology, and medicine to summarize the state of AI in the work world.

Benefits

Undoubtedly, AI provides at least four immediate benefits to users:

• Expanded content. AI possesses an unmatched capacity to capture information on any imaginable topic from a vast range of global databases. A researcher can then ask for AI to organize this data into manageable chunks if it already has not.
• Increased speed. AI retrieves data at a remarkably fast pace that a human being cannot. What takes the savviest researcher hours, days, or weeks to collect takes AI seconds.
• Enhanced quality. AI writes well enough in virtually every orthographic language. This quality check closes the articulation gap between nonnative writers of a language and their more fluent counterparts.
• Broadened scrutiny. AI efficiently uncovers plagiarism. Such a feature is invaluable for teachers, editors, and proprietary businesspeople in assigning original work.

Concerns

Every research article I have read about AI has concluded that the writer must beware of many issues, five of which I mention here:

• Credibility. We may get from AI contrived, imprecise, or unreliable information. Therefore, we must verify content we get from multiple, reliable sources.
• Originality. Nothing from AI is original, and though it provides sources from where it gathered material, it might not be citing the primary source. This task has always been the researcher's job and continues to be. 
• Transparency. Despite AI programmers' best efforts, AI at times does not provide sources, challenging writers to investigate the source material for themselves.
• Accessibility. AI may provide information that is nearly impossible or impractical to trace. This dilemma forces writers to practice the old adage from journalism: When in doubt, leave it out.
• Compliance. While AI has been around for a few years, it is still a new technology that has left a lot of organizations deciding on how to best use it. In some places, using it equates to an unethical breach of company policy, so writers should know the organizational policy. 

As I wrote in "Using AI to Improve Writing Creativity, Productivity, and Quality," writers must remember that they are the boss and AI is just their assistant.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 6: Proofreading

As of now, AI is better at proofreading than it is at editing, with a caveat. In distinguishing between editing and proofreading, you can use as an example having written in first draft:

Evlyn impacted me.

When editing, you focus on command of language. In this case, you decide to change the verb impacted:

Evlyn affected me.

When proofreading, you search for overlooked errors, such as spacing, font, spelling, and number inconsistencies. Here you pick up the spelling error Evlyn:

Evelyn affected me.

AI ensures you spell, capitalize, and punctuate properly. You can also count on AI to make every sentence comply with standard grammar rules. Your typos now are less tolerable since you have AI to run a quick check for you before pressing send. 

But beware! AI loses its effectiveness for various reasons, some programmatic and some bandwidth. I recently prompted it to "Proofread only for overlooked errors without changing the content" of a third draft that AI and I collaborated on. It responded that the draft was error-free yet reverted to an earlier draft. Clearly, AI and I have a different definition of proofread. Also, it might have been suffering from information overload because of the multiple drafts we covered. In addition, here are four proofreading points it did not detect:

• Repetitive phrasing. One of my sentences read Effective immediately, a one-year lease a $90 per square foot is available immediately. AI did not report the repetitive opening and closing phrases.
• Spelling inconsistencies. I mistakenly included alternate spellings of smartboard and smart board in the same document, which AI did not call out.
• Number-letter spacing. I inserted a phone number without a space on either side of two words, at732-718-3361to, which AI ignored.
• Spacing inconsistencies. I drop only one space after a period, but I inadvertently double spaced after one sentence in a document of about 20 sentences. While I do well at revising and editing, proofreading is my biggest weakness in the quality control phase of the writing process. Luckily, I saw this error, which AI overlooked.

Once again, the theme of this series has been not to get lazy. The final look of your draft is on you, not AI.

Using AI at Each Step of the Writing Process, Part 5: Editing

The average business or technical writer does not tend toward deep research and practice in rhetorical theory when editing. But those who do not know a sentence from a citrus fruit or a punctuation mark from a pumpkin would do well to ask AI to edit their messages before pressing send.

AI will not let you down when it comes to writing grammatically flawless sentences. It usually knows where periods and commas go, and it can help you to achieve plain language, if that's what you're aiming for. Enough research shows that AI can close the gap between limited English proficient writers and their native English-speaking counterparts. 

But grammatical propriety ain't everything. I wouldn't depend too much on AI for three critical areas of writing: style, tone, and content.

Style. You might prefer writing in a certain style, for instance, exclusively using active or passive voice. If you are an informed writer, you can dictate these stylistic wishes to AI, but you won't get something that seems like your style. 

Tone. While AI is quite good in writing proper sentences, it is weak in determining the proper tone based on your audience and the business situation. You will have to figure that out on your own based on your professional experience and situational awareness.

Content. Whenever I ask AI to edit a passage for me, it overreaches. For instance, I recently asked it to edit a passage for plain language. It changed the word permanent to for a long time. There is a difference in meaning, which AI is still inadequate in detecting. 

You'll have to detemine whether AI is doing the right thing. Only you know what you really want to say. Don't let AI take over the writing situation completely.