If you are, you’d better watch out. And if you want your work to be taken seriously, you’d better be extra careful. It’s no good working hard on some great content for your blog or website if a carelessly included homophone turns it into a joke – unless it’s meant to be funny. So [...]

  … Or, what NOT to do (a plain language guide) LEAFING through my law student daughter’s books the other day, I came across this perfectly delightful list of rules, headed  Please do not take the following advice: Principles of Legal Writing 1. Never use one word where 10 will do. 2. Never use a small [...]

… Better Eat, Pray, Love JUST before film director Alfred Hitchcock released The Birds almost 50 years ago, many people in the English-speaking world were outraged. It wasn’t so much the film’s creepy theme – flocks of sinister black birds viciously attacking villagers for no apparent reason – that freaked them out. If you were [...]

Is this grammar goof just another reflection of our “me first” society, asks guest blogger KJ Elsdon EXCUSE me if I sound even more irritable than usual, but I spent most of the night lying awake, listening to the merry sound of British holidaymakers screaming and shouting outside my bedroom window. Living on the Costa [...]