GameDevMike

In the last English Tip, I talked about countable and uncountable nouns. That was the groundwork for today’s tip: proper use of the words fewer and less.

One mistake I see repeatedly across the internet is the improper use of less. On any given day I will see multiple instances in forum posts at GameDev.net, in blog entries from one or more of the many blogs I frequently read, in articles written on programming topics, and many other places where people write publicly. As an example, I’ll quote (anonymously to protect the guilty) a line from a post today on a blog I read every day, from a blogger who’s opinion I have come to respect:

There’s an interesting little article in the Wall Street Journal today
talking about Netflix and how the unlimited choice and unlimited
viewing time has caused subscribers to actually watch LESS movies.

Now, ignoring the fact that he used caps rather than bold letters to indicate stress (though that’s not an uncommon thing, it’s commonly accepted that bold letters, or in cases where that is not possible then asterisks *like this*, are used to mark stressed words — but that’s a formatting issue and not a grammatical one), there is a major error with the use of less in the quoted sentence. Do you know what the problem is? Here’s the same sentence, corrected:

There’s an interesting little article in the Wall Street Journal today
talking about Netflix and how the unlimited choice and unlimited
viewing time has caused subscribers to actually watch [fewer] movies.

If it is not immediately obvious to you why the original sentence is not correct but the second one is, I refer you again to my post on countable and uncountable nouns. Of course, I’m going to tell you, anyway. The first sentence is wrong because movie is a countable noun. The word less should only be used with uncountable nouns. It’s okay to say less coffee, less bread, or less money. It is not okay to say less games, less chairs, or less ideas. With countable nouns, fewer is the word you want to use.

This is one of those mistakes that can completely ruin an otherwise well-written document. It’s the sort of mistake that even high school students shouldn’t make, yet it is often made by people that have had several years of college education. If you are someone who often makes this mistake, perhaps because you didn’t even realize that it is a mistake, then correcting it will go a long way to making you a much more compelling writer and speaker.