For some people, when they have the choice between using affected or impacted to refer to a result, there’s only one correct choice.
Over the years, I’ve mentioned a big grammatical pet peeve of mine. I hate it when people use “due to” when they mean “because of.” I’m beginning to feel the same way about the question of whether to use affected or impacted when you’re talking about something having an effect on something else.
My dislike of due to came directly from a copyediting class. The copyediting instructor, for whatever reason, hated the misuse of due to, and I picked it up from him.
Back then, when people spoke or wrote about something having an effect on something, they said or wrote that something had been affected. Nowadays, people are switching to impacted over affected. It’s also true of the -ing forms of the words: things are now commonly said to be impacting people or things rather than affecting them.
Affect or effect?
There has always been confusion between these two words. So let’s settle that confusion first.
We normally see affect used as a verb. Merriam-Webster defines affect this way: “to act on or change someone or something.” If you cause a change, you have affected something.
We normally see effect as a noun. It means “the result or outcome” of something.
When you see that one thing has affected another, whatever the change happens to be is the effect.
If you associate affect with another A-word, action, you’ll be right most of the time.
Yes, there are situations in which affect can be a noun and instances in which effect can be a verb. But we’ll talk about that in a future post. For now, we’re just going to worry about the most common usage of each word.
Now, let’s consider affected or impacted
We just established that affect, for our purposes in this post, means “to act on or change.”
When you consult Merriam-Webster, you’ll find a couple of definitions for impact as a noun. The number one definition is a striking of one thing against another, “a forceful contact or onset.” The second definition is “a significant or major effect.”
When you look up the definition of impact as a verb, you find that it can mean “to have a direct effect on or impinge on” or “to strike forcefully” or “to cause to strike forcefully.” A second definition is “to fix firmly by or as if by packing or wedging” or “to “to impinge or make contact especially forcefully.”
The dictionary seems to prefer the word impact used to refer to actual physical contact between two things rather than a more abstract cause of change.
There are copyeditors out there who feel as strongly about the “affected or impacted” question the same way that one I ran into all those years ago felt about the “due to or because of” question.
I found an example of one of them
Alexis Grant tells the story of her time at the Houston Chronicle. She said she once “mistakenly” wrote about “how some city legislation would impact residents.”
Her copyeditor pounced.
“Impact means collision,” my editor said as he changed the word in my copy. “Like in a car crash. Laws don’t impact people. Laws affect people.”
Normally, the word wouldn’t bother me…if I only saw it occasionally. But nowadays, everything impacts everything and nothing affects anything.
Impact has become a word of choice so quickly that it now feels like a cliché.
One of the advantages of being an editor — which I do in my real job — is that I get to be the one who changes words when necessary.
You can bet that I change due to to because of unless the writer is using due to to mean “caused by,” which is its correct usage.
You can also bet that I change impacted to affected whenever I see that one.
I like that Houston copyeditor’s definition: “Impact means collision.” I just wish more people would remember those three words!