The police often have a hand in giving out long sentences. Now they’re writing them. A potentially record-breaking 102-word single sentence appears in the Association of Chief Police Officers’ comeback to a government report on policing. Here’s the...
Catie Holdridge
Without ‘i before e’ won’t we all be at sea?
Am I the only one who is taking the decision to ban the ‘i before e’ rule a little too much to heart? It’s been deemed too ‘confusing’ by the latest government guidance on National Primary Strategy for under-11s, since many words in the...
Spelling trouble
The results are in ... for Britain’s top ten most frequently misspelt words. And the winners are: 1 Definitely (Definately) 2 Sacrilegious (Sacreligious) 3 Indict (Indite) 4 Manoeuvre (Maneouvre) 5 Bureaucracy (Beaurocracy) 6 Broccoli (Brocolli) 7 Phlegm...
How to use subheads
It’s not always true that your readers will want to read everything you’ve written – particularly if it’s a 300-page document. Even if you’ve done all you can to break it up and make it as readable as possible, the demands of time we all face may mean they can only...
The joy of specifics
It’s always a great feeling of revelation (not to mention vindication) when something you have long suspected or known to be true suddenly pops up and proves itself out in the real world. I found this recently regarding the power of being precise. Now, naturally...
Guide the way with subheading signposts
It’s not always true that your readers will want to read everything you’ve written – particularly if it’s a 300 page document. Even if you’ve done all you can to break it up and make it as readable as possible, the demands of time we all...
Is it a feathered sky-dwelling nest-builder? Is it an aerodynamic pan-destinational person carrier? No, it’s Sloganizer!
Are you struggling to come up with a new nugget of corporate gobbledegook? Could your report benefit from some indecipherable doublespeak? Are you floundering from a lack of filler? Never fear. Sloganizer to the rescue! The new application for the iPhone brings the...
Sir Clement Freud, 24 April 1924 – 15 April 2009
Writer, broadcaster, politician and chef: Clement Freud never ran short of ways to fill his time. This was true until the very end. He died at his desk yesterday. The grandson of Sigmund ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’ Freud, he first appeared in the...
Keeping it (un)real
He’s a shrewd one, that Sir Alan Sugar. As he announced in the opening episode of The Apprentice, he realises that knowing every word to ‘Candle in the wind’ does not mean he is Elton John. Using our Suralan to Plain English dictionary, we see...
A pollack by any other name
We should all be eating more pollack, for cod’s sake. So say the environmentalists trying to save the perennial partner to chips from an early, non-watery grave: cod stocks in the North Sea are a mere fifth of what they were forty years ago. Sainsbury’s...
I tweet, therefore I am
Thinking about jumping onto this bandwagon. But where will it all end? So might read my inaugural ‘tweet’ – by definition: an answer to the question ‘what are you doing?’ in 140 characters or fewer – on the micro-blogging site...
On the origin of speaking
Last Thursday marked the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin: an event that did not go uncelebrated at Emphasis HQ. And even as we hung the streamers and tied up the balloons we were silently thanking the birthday boy for explaining the opposable thumbs that allowed us...