Which is Correct? Less or Fewer? More or Over?

To obtain my degree in television production in college, I had to take a course on media writing. For those of you who do not have a degree in communications, media writing is a course that teaches you how to write clean, readable copy for news articles, media releases, and other public relations content. Some of the areas the class covered include AP Style, as well as using “less” instead of “fewer” and “more” instead of “over” when discussing amounts. The reason was that literal correctness is crucial in this type of writing.

For the record, “less” is for something you can count as a single amount and “fewer” is for things you can count individually. “More” and “over” can both be applied to numbers, although “over” technically means to be above something. If you want to be fully correct in your usage with numbers or amounts, go with “more than.”

A lot of things have changed since I was in college. Online media has surpassed print in ways that were not thought possible, social media is now just as viable a medium – if not more so – than newspapers or television, and a kid can now do everything I learned about video production with an iPad.

Oh, and no one really cares any more if you use less, fewer, more, or over.

While it is easy to decry this as a decline in Western Civilization, I tend to think of it as the media catching up with society. Things have changed over the last few decades, but even when I went to college, it was completely acceptable to say that there were “over 20 people in the room.” It also makes things easier to not have to repeat words if you are having to write about multiple amounts in the same paragraph.

That being said, every good sentence is built one word at a time so use your best judgement on which one is the most appropriate. Now, to give you a sense of how strict media writing can be, here are two editors on The Wire discussing the appropriate use of the word, “evacuate.”