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Insubordinate conjunctions 27 Mar 2013 | 01:15 am
In certain situations, the word “that” seems to be falling by the wayside. The following sentence in the BBC’s article about the tragic death of a 14-year-old as a result of an alleged dog attack pro...
Because noun: my response 12 Jan 2013 | 04:56 pm
My good friend Paul today highlighted to me a rather interesting blogpost. It talks of the recent removal of a preposition after the word “because”. Examples cited include: We invaded Iraq because fr...
Proofreading: what constitutes the extra mile (1.6km)? 10 Jan 2013 | 01:58 am
Proofreading: it isn’t what it used to be. In the olden days, yesteryear and indeed days of yore, proofreading was a very different task to what it has become. Back then, it involved sitting down in ...
The change from read to red, with associated changes 13 May 2012 | 09:42 pm
Yesterday my friend Paul suggested evolving the English language to change the perfect tense of the verb “read” to “red”. This change has been endorsed by the Brit. Eng. language committee, and will c...
Syllepsis 7 Apr 2012 | 09:02 am
I learnt a new word today: syllepsis. A syllepsis is a specific type of zeugma, which begs the question: what’s a zeugma. A zeugma is a figure of speech in which multiple parts of a sentence are joi...
Staff is vs. staff are 6 Apr 2012 | 03:58 am
A friend emailed yesterday asking why Microsoft tried to change “staff are” to “staffs are”. Here’s some background. Imagine the following sentence. The staff are going to go bananas when they find ...
Eleven days; 119,754 words; 31,587 changes 28 Feb 2012 | 03:51 am
Last month, one of our biggest clients forewarned us of a proofreading project coming up in late February. At the time, they indicated it would be around 25,000 words, “with a few other documents in ...
The introduction of the asterisk 29 Jan 2012 | 01:13 pm
As a proofreader, many would think that I’m averse to changes in language. But I’m not. I welcome change. While I’m not one to fully embrace txtspk, there are certain features that I enjoy and adopt. ...
Are you trying to write a letter? 29 Jan 2012 | 12:43 pm
At work the other day, someone was writing a letter. A traditional, formal letter on letterhead and everything. It was to a client, for audit purposes. Hence the formality. There was question about w...
Grammatical renegades 22 Jan 2012 | 01:23 pm
There are three types of shop. There are the grammatical stalwarts, clinging to the apostrophe in their Men’s, Women’s and Children’s departments, no doubt seething at the lacking punctuation in Mens...
