If there were seven deadly grammar sins, one of them would surely be the sin of doubles.

What do I mean by that?

Well, oftentimes people will use double negatives in a sentence,

double prepositions, or double subjects, and sometimes it can alter

the meaning of their sentence or make their sentence really clunky.

So we want to avoid doubles.

I 'll give you an example.

The other night I was watching Saturday Night Live with my husband

and Justin Timberlake came on and I said,

" That guy can't do no wrong."

Well my husband turned to me and he said, " First of all, you're married.

Second of all, you just committed the sin of a double negative."

Let me show you what it looks like.

So if we say " He can't do no wrong " we have two negatives in the sentence.

One is the word " can't."

The positive would be to say " He can do."

The negative is to say " He can't do."

And the other negative in the sentence is to say, " no," " no wrong," as opposed to just wrong.

By doing this, by putting a double negative in the sentence, we actually

change the meaning to be the exact opposite of our intention.

What this really means is that he can't do anything right, and that's not what I intended to say.

Now I 'll show you what a double preposition looks like.

In this sentence, we say " he jumped off of the stage."

Well, here we have two prepositions.

Prepositions indicate the location of words in relation to one another.

Our two preposition are " off of."

In this case they don't change the meaning, but they're unnecessary.

It would mean the same thing if we just said, " He jumped off the stage."

It gives us a more streamlined sentence to drop one of the prepositions.

Finally, I 'll show you what a double subject looks like.

In this sentence, " Justin, he can sing," we have two subjects ; " Justin " and " he."

They both mean the same thing and therefore they're both unnecessary.

Again it's much crisper and clearer if we just say, " Justin can sing."

So, that's a little tip about avoiding the deadly sin of doubles in your writing.