fewer vs. less

The basic rule is that if you can count it, use fewer. If you can’t count it, use less.

Examples
After some reworking, the dish now has fewer calories.
After removing half the butter, the dish has less fat.

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This entry (permalink) was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 12:38 PM by akuban and categorized in Words to Watch.

Comments (2) left to “fewer vs. less”

  1. Brian Preston-Campbe wrote:

    Adam — how do your Style Bites relate to guidelines like AP? When I was in the final editing stages of my book, the editor sent me a Word doc with their style guidelines, many of them food and recipe specific. It taught me a lot about what to do for my everyday writing.

    Posted on 23-Feb-09 at 3:12 pm | Permalink

  2. akuban wrote:

    Brian: The style bites here are basically a hodgepodge of AP and Chicago Manual of Style rules—more weighted toward Chicago than AP, though, since I spent most of my copy-editing career using Chicago.

    I’m lucky in that most of the queue editors on Serious Eats have an innate sense of style that jibes with Chicago, and the Style Bites edicts only appear when things start to get a bit of line.

    My official policy would probably be: “Familiarize yourself with Chicago, then read Style Bites to see where SE deviates—or where problem areas often arise.”

    Posted on 23-Feb-09 at 3:46 pm | Permalink

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