Hello everyone!

I’m back to talk about another often-misused word pair, and today’s culprits are particularly close to my heart. You see, I had a wonderful professor in college who used to rant about people using reference when they ought to be using refer, and so I can’t help but think of him and all he taught me about writing every time I encounter the same error.

The crux of the issue with these two words is that refer is the verb form while reference is the noun form, but it’s become quite popular to use reference as a verb. Now, you might be wondering what’s wrong with that, since you would observe if you looked up reference in the Merriam-Webster dictionary that it is listed as a verb as well as a noun. The problem with relying solely on the dictionary to determine appropriate word usage, however, is that the dictionary is designed to reflect popular usage of words–not to present what is actually correct according to the rules of the language. So while the dictionary’s a great tool to determine word meanings and spellings, it’s better to rely on style guides (Chicago Manual of Style, APA, MLA, and many others) to learn the rules about word usage.

Which brings us back to the fact that refer is the verb and reference is the noun. So, She refers to her style guides frequently, not She references her style guides frequently. Similarly, She uses her style guides as references, not She uses her style guides as refers. And it’s even okay to say She makes reference to her style guides frequently (although I’d advise against that since it adds an unnecessary verb)–the key point is to keep reference as a noun and leave the verb work to refer. I promise that it will make your writing stand out!

Until next time!