Certain sets of words in the English language tend to confuse writers. I have found the following to be among them:
FOREWORD / PREFACE
These two words neither look nor sound alike, but they are similar in that each is the name of a piece of writing that is most often found at the beginning of a book, especially a nonfiction book, before the main content.
A foreword usually extolls the value of the book, the significance of its contents, and/or the qualifications of the author.
A preface, on the other hand, gives the reader some additional information that the author wants to share that relates to the contents of the book without falling directly within its parameters. It can help the reader to focus on the purpose of the book and to interpret the book’s content in the manner the author intended. The preface can help give the reader the proper mindset for encountering the information to follow or make the content more meaningful to the reader.
The main difference is that a foreword is generally written by someone other than the author while a preface is written by the author.
INCORRECT: I hope I can get Stephen King to write a preface for my horror novel.
CORRECT: I hope I can get Stephen King to write a foreword for my horror novel.
INCORRECT: The author’s foreword really helped me to understand why she had written the book.
CORRECT: The author’s preface really helped me to understand why she had written the book.
NOTE: Some writers mistakenly spell foreword without the E, making it forward, a different word altogether. To aid in remembering to include that E, think of foreword as a word that goes before the main content of a book, and like the word before, it has an E on the end of the syllable fore.
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