When I was a child and my family went out to eat, a common game was to race to find the first typo in the menu. In high school, when a student made a grammatical mistake in an announcement at assembly (e.g., using ‘i.e.’ when he or she should have used ‘e.g.’, or, more commonly, using ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’), the meeting would stop and the headmaster would give a brief lecture on grammar. In college, I was a tutor and had to deal with some interesting spelling and grammar choices.

So, when I had to email professors at graduate schools to ask them if they would be interested in taking me on as a student, one of my main anxieties was caused by the advisor/adviser controversy. You can tell I’m serious about spelling and grammar because I promoted what is really more of a confusion to a full-blown “controversy”.

Purdue University has a nice blurb about the controversy here. Their advice (or is it advise?) is to do whatever your institution mandates. They deferred to the Purdue Marketing Communications Editorial Style Guide. For those of us - prospective students, for example - who are not sure if our institution has such a guide, here’s a helpful trick. Google “advisor site:InstitutionURL”, and see how many hits you get. Do it again, substituting ‘adviser’ for ‘advisor’. Here are my results:

site:mcgill.ca adviser  - about 4,470 results

site:mcgill.ca advisor - about 23,400 results

I ended up going with ‘advisor’.