Jul 19, 2012 / Language & Grammar

Affect and Effect

The distinction between “affect” and “effect” trips up lots of people, but with one or two little mnemonics, you can master this tricky pair in probably 95% of cases.

Effect is almost always used as a noun meaning “the result of some action.”

Affect is almost always used as a verb meaning “to influence or bring about change.”

Affect, which is an action (another word for “verb”), starts with an a, like action. There’s your first mnemonic. When something affects something else, it has an effect. The affect or verb happens first and the effect or noun second, just as affect comes first in the alphabet and effect second. There’s your second mnemonic.

My experience with mnemonics tends to be that once I’ve had to use them enough, I internalize the underlying grammar that they help me to remember so that I no longer have to remember the little hint. So the affect/effect distinction comes naturally to me now without the memory tricks, and maybe it will for you too one day, if this is one of those distinctions you struggle with.

This entry wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t complicate things a little. There are of course alternate uses for both words. You can speak of a person’s mood or way of outwardly presenting his mood as his affect (in psychology you’ll hear of a person’s “flat affect”). And you do sometimes hear of someone “effecting change.” These other uses, along with the fact that the two words look and sound similar, are what wind up causing all the confusion. But these are pretty specialized and uncommon uses, and if you remember that affect is almost always an action or verb and effect almost always a noun, you’ll almost always be correct in your usage.

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  3. I also associate these words with body-based actions relating to the arrival of sensory information to the central nervous system (afferent) and the exiting signals to the motor system (musculoskeletal; efferent).

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  4. I know a lot of people struggle with discreet/discrete so I made up this mnemonic: in ‘discreet’ the two ‘e’s are huddled together like they’re keeping a secret, but in ‘discrete’ they’re separate.

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  11. This is awesome =) I have a whole category in my blog dedicated for that kind of thing =) it’s called “Linguistic Moments” =)

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  12. Nice post. I have done this in my lessons as well.
    I just did a lesson on ‘homophones’ …my kids loved it! I gave two (or three) ‘hints’ for the word.
    ex. #1, not here. #2 listen to.
    I did about 45 of these for them, it was actually good practice for their spelling as well!

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  16. Finally a definitive answer, albeit with a caveat, and now I see where two of my problems stemmed….in grade school I was incorrectly told (by a teacher sadly) that Effect starts with an “E” and there’s an “E” in verb, and I have battled with that notion and subsequent corrections ever since. Then I read about Grey and Gray and realized I typically opted for the Grey version because my grandparents were fans of greyhounds and I learned that spelling long before I learned the “A” version making me an anomaly among Americans, I guess. I’m feeling so much lighter having lifted these grammatic burdens from my shoulders.

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  18. Thanks for the rule of thumb.

    However, there is a noun version of “affect” which probably adds to the confusion. This version, often used in a psychological context, defines it as an emotional reaction to a given event. Example from Webster’s: “Many of these young killers display an absence of what psychiatrists call affect. They show no discernible emotional reaction to what they have done” (Richard Stengel, Time Magazine; Sept. 16, 1985).

    Just saying. 🙂

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  19. Umm… In my experience, when people confuse “affect” and “effect,” they don’t do so because they think incorrectly that affect is a noun and effect is a verb. In fact, if they thought that, they’d of course be correct, as you point out in your final paragraph. Each word can be either a noun or a verb, and that’s what creates the problem (in my experience). Therefore, you really need a quadrant model rather than a simple binary distinction. If you “affect” a change, you alter the way the change is taking place, whereas if you “effect” a change, you cause it to happen. People mess that up all the time. Also, “affect” as a noun means something like emotion (depending on your definition of each term), whereas “effect” as a noun is what we all know as the flip side of a cause.

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  23. Awesome entry! It’s nice to know people actually care about this sort of stuff! 😀 Completely agree with @Pimpmyworld – Add “your” + “you’re” to that! 🙂

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