Tham khảo tài liệu 'knowledge vocabulary4', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | file C Temp livres commonerrors errors ONLY Writers often inadvertently create confusion by placing only incorrectly in a sentence. It should go immediately before the word or phrase it modifies. I lost my only shirt means that I had but one to begin with. I lost only my shirt means I didn t lose anything else. Only I lost my shirt means that I was the only person in my group to lose a shirt. Strictly speaking I only lost my shirt should mean I didn t destroy it or have it stolen--I just lost it but in common speech this is usually understood as being identical with I lost only my shirt. Scrutinize your uses of only to make sure you are not creating unwanted ambiguities. ONTO ON TO Onto and on to are often interchangeable but not always. Consider the effect created by wrongly using onto in the following sentence when on to is meant We re having hors d oeuvres in the garden and for dinner moving onto the house. If the on is part of an expression like moving on it can t be shoved together with a to that just happens to follow it. OPPRESS REPRESS Dictators commonly oppress their citizens and repress dissent but these words don t mean exactly the same thing. Repress just means keep under control. Sometimes repression is a good thing During the job interview repress the temptation to tell Mr. Brown that he has toilet paper stuck to his shoe. Oppression is always bad and implies serious persecution. ORAL VERBAL Some people insist that verbal refers to anything expressed in words whether written or spoken while oral refers exclusively to speech but in common usage verbal has become widely accepted for the latter meaning. However in legal contexts an unwritten agreement is still an oral contract not a verbal contract. ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE Many pretentious writers have begun to use the expression orders of magnitude without understanding what it means. The concept derives from the scientific notation of very large numbers in which each order of magnitude is ten .
