Affect vs. Effect

Saturday night, after more than a few vodkas, my family had quite a spirited discussion on grammar and usage. What can I say? We are a barrel of laughs. The affect vs. effect debate came up and my dad and I were certain we had it correct, although my SIL disagreed. Well, we had it 99% correct. And as I am one to always admit when I am wrong, I wanted to post the difference here. As soon as I get home from work, I will be calling both my SIL and my father to set the record straight.

IN GENERAL: AFFECT is a verb and EFFECT is the noun. For example -Getting drunk by the pool at your brother’s house will affect the way you feel the next day. The effect it will have on you is not necessarily pleasant. Makes pretty good sense, right?

However, as the English language tends to have an exception to every rule, there are two exceptions here.

EFFECT can be a verb, sometimes. For example - Mary, please effect a total makeover of this memo. Effect is the verb there because there is a direct object (makeover). Fun, huh? I think that no one should speak like that anyway, so in my humble opinion, it’s very safe to use the Affect = verb/Effect = noun rule, because as I mentioned before, that is correct most of the time. And if you don’t speak like a total automaton, you will never have cause to use effect as a verb.

AFFECT can also sometimes be a noun, but it tends to be used mostly in the context of psychology. For example - Joe exhibited no affect when he learned that his pet turtle had escaped. Again, not the way that the majority of the population would use that word, so you could go your whole life and never need to use affect in that way.

There you have it. More than you ever wanted to know about those two words, but now that you have read this, you will have no excuse to use them incorrectly ever again. By the way, I found my information on this site, in case you are interested.

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