July | 2019 | The Crabby Copyeditor

As an editor, one of my duties is to tighten someone’s writing, to get rid of extraneous fluff that adds nothing more than word count.

Though I could make an extensive list…I’ll confine myself to just this one pet peeve: Whether or not.

Do you really need the or not after whether? In most instances, no. The or not is just fluff begging to be edited out.

Take a look at this:

I didn’t know whether or not you would come home tonight.

What am I really concerned about here? Whether you would come home at all is what I’m concerned about, so the or not is extraneous. So, the correct form would be:

I didn’t know whether you would come home tonight.

In the next example, whether you come home or whether you don’t come home is equally important. You have a task to complete either way.

Text me whether or not you are going to come home tonight.

Had I said: Text me whether you are coming home tonight, I would only expect a text if you were coming home, not if you weren’t.

Do you see the difference?

I was teaching an ESL* class not too long ago, and we came upon a word that confused people. The word was “gray.”

Some folks, especially those who liked to drink Earl Grey tea, insisted that grey was the correct spelling. And in some countries, it is. In fact, grey is the preferred spelling for our cousins across the pond (and north of the border).

But, as I tactfully told everyone, we’re in America now. In America, the correct spelling is gray. Just look on any Crayola crayon if you don’t believe me.

My high school refresher grammar teacher, Alfrava Latham, had a great trick to help those of us who read a lot of English classics remember which spelling is correct.

Gray has an A in it; America starts with an A.

Grey has an E in it; England starts with an E.

My class understood quickly. I hope you do, too.

*ESL is the acronym for English as a second language.