It’s a rule beloved by schoolteachers: starting a sentence with and or but is wrong. It’s also one of the few rules of grammar many people remember actually being mentioned at school. But could we in fact have ditched it, along with that uniform shirt on which...
Should you write ‘the person that’ or ‘the person who’? Reader Simon Walters, of FD Solutions, wrote in about one of his language bugbears. Namely: ‘misuse of the word “that” when “who” would be more appropriate. It’s so annoying when people say “The person that...
Grammar is about the rules that structure language. Knowing and using grammar effectively is a sure-fire way to make sure you are understood, which is always useful. But there are various erroneous ‘rules’ of grammar masquerading as law out there. Beware these...
SEO (search engine optimisation) is often high on the business agenda. Being found online is vital for most organisations – and harder than ever to achieve. So those organisations may go looking for a company or tool to help them appear near the top of the...
The language women use in meetings could be holding them back in business, according to new research. The study, an 18-month long examination of the speaking patterns of men and women within seven major companies, was run by applied linguistics lecturer Dr Judith...
Blog reader Bill Friar got in touch with us to air one of his professional writing bugbears: ‘I would dearly love to see an item on the creeping trend of putting commas between people’s names and their titles or descriptive terms. For example: “Prime...
It’s not often that punctuation makes the headlines. But the uproar over the apparent threat to the Oxford comma has proved that passion for punctuation can bubble just below the surface. (It also answers indie band Vampire Weekend’s question: who gives a **** about...
A Sussex-based brewery has upset fans of punctuation with its inconsistent use of apostrophes. Apostrophe Protection Society member Jonathan Cook has taken to Facebook to campaign for Harveys Brewery to sort out its style. While the brewery usually omits the...
Program(me): it’s a useful word. It can refer to code for a computer (or the writing of such code), the printed running order of a performance or event (or the scheduling of either), a television or radio show, and more. But which spelling is right: program or...
As we’ve just established when it should be program or programme, now seems a fitting time to ask: is it disk or disc? And is this another set up for a US/UK battle for spelling territory? Um, no. There wouldn’t be much point. Although disk is considered...
There’s a phrase you’re bound to need to use when writing a CV, a bio for a proposal, or showing off in a World of Warcraft chat room, to prove how practised you (or your colleague/client/avatar) are. But there you may pause (and you wouldn’t be the first). Is it...
English is, to quote The Economist, the language of global business. You may feel you already have many of the secrets of better business writing at your fingertips, but writing for an international audience can require a new set of rules. Here are five top tips for...