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Language abuse
Posted by: Jacob Funnell
25 / 05 / 17
Walk down any busy street and you’ll soon see someone head-down, absorbed by their phone, tapping away to someone unseen. There’s a good chance they’re on Twitter or Facebook, or chatting via WhatsApp or SMS (or one of many other messaging apps). Using these services now accounts for much of the writing we do each […]
Posted by: Simon Busch
31 / 03 / 16
What’s the right tone to strike in business writing? Formal? Yes, you want to come across as a serious contributor to the subject at hand and not to sound too … chatty? Hmmm. But if you’re too serious, don’t you risk boring people and losing them? Tone is a minefield. And it’s made all the […]
Posted by: Richard Smyth
17 / 06 / 14
Here are the plagiarists of Internet Town With Ctrl+C and clattering keys They prowl and creep when you’re asleep And take whatever they please. Sounds good, right? They aren’t my words though: we lifted them from Allan Ahlberg’s Cops and Robbers, then made a couple of tweaks. These days, pinching stuff from the internet is […]
18 / 03 / 14
Repetition isn’t a dirty word. I repeat: repetition isn’t a dirty word. But some of the tricks we use to avoid it are positively vulgar. We’re quite happy, it seems, to repeat ourselves when our intention is rhetorical – when our priority is emphasis, emphasis, emphasis. And yet when repetition is required for the purpose […]
Posted by: Catie Holdridge
09 / 03 / 11
David Cameron has referred to it as his ‘mission’ and his ‘passion’, but it does seem that very few people are entirely sure what the ‘Big Society’ is actually all about. This isn’t too surprising when even those well and truly behind the idea are not helping matters. Phillip Blond, director of the think tank […]
17 / 01 / 11
How many words can you use to say, ‘Rain all day’? A wet start to the day with some heavier bursts of rain around. It is likely to stay wet for much of the day with further rain at times. Nice work, BBC Weather.
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