Who does the proofreading in your company? A busy colleague who’s already under so much pressure they’re as likely to spot those rogue typos as the person who wrote the copy? Or a dedicated professional who knows what they’re doing? Everyone knows that sending out or publishing stuff with grammatical mistakes and typos in it
Grammar
With many of us working from our printer-less homes, and doing our bit for the environment, we’re having to resort to screen proofreading and mark-up. This makes spotting those elusive typos even harder. Or does it? Can we use technology to improve our proofreading skills? As everyone who’s mistyped “your” for “you’re” knows, it’s really
Can’t remember if ‘its’ means belonging to it or it is? Wonder where to put apostrophes with words ending in ‘s’? Haven’t a clue what ‘joint possession’ is let alone how to do it properly? See the Ultimate Flowchart to Using Apostrophes from the excellent Grammar Check website Here is your definitive guide to the
How well do you know literary devices? What’s the difference between a malapropism and a spoonerism? Ever wondered what’s makes an abbreviation an acronym? And are you in the habit of creating portmanteaus without realising it? Put your literary genius to the test and see how much you know (or don’t know) about neologisms and
“Up with which I shall not put” and other preposition problems
02 Apr / by: Lorraine Forrest-Turner / 0 comments /Why do we live in a town but on a street? Is something different from or different to? And did Churchill really say “this is the sort of nonsense up with which I shall not put”? Prepositions (those little words like ‘on’, ‘in’, ‘at’ and ‘to’ that describe the position or movement on the noun)
If your dog does a poo, please put it in a bin.
01 Nov / by: Lorraine / 0 comments /Context plays an enormous role in communications, and woe betide the communicator who gets it wrong. Take my headline. We know it doesn’t mean put the dog in the but it’s a great example of context. We know we’re meant to pick up dog mess so we instantly understand the message. We also know that
