I was recently reading a new self-published Christian novel, and I was impressed. After several pages, I hadn’t found one typo, misspelling, or misused apostrophe—not even a misplaced comma or modifier. Wow! The text read smoothly, cleanly—a refreshing change from many self-published novels.
Then there it was, on the first page of chapter two: the young woman’s gate faltered.
Her what? I pictured a small door shuddering and squeaking on rusty hinges.
But, from the story’s context, I knew that couldn’t be right. The main character was out for a run. She was nowhere near her gate, or any gate. Something startled her, disrupting her jog. What faltered? Her jogging legs.
And there we have it: when the author wrote gate, she really meant gait.
- Gate means “an opening in a wall or fence”
- Gait means “a manner of walking or moving on foot”
Consider the following:
What a beautiful gate!
What a beautiful gait!
Both are grammatically correct; both have different meanings. But placed in the context of a story, each sentence could be wrong.
Understandably, it’s easy to make word usage mistakes, particularly in a novel when a writer or reader isn’t deliberately scrutinizing each and every letter, space, and character. A word usage error might slide by authors and readers, but it shouldn’t slip past a proofreader. A proofreader knows the subtle differences between similar words—or at least knows enough to look them up.
Using gate instead of gait is just one example of many word usage errors that spell-check can’t possibly catch. Many manuscripts contain numerous instances of incorrect word usage, but professional proofreaders know which words to be on the lookout for—and how to correct them.
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Tags: Christian fiction proofreaders, Christian manuscript proofreader, Christian novel proofreader, Christian proofreaders, Christian proofreading, gate or gait, gate vs. gait, homophones, proofreading word usage