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Advice and tips
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 […]
Posted by: Cathy Dann
20 / 05 / 14
Last week, in our post on units and spaces, we asked you to take a short survey. We’re delighted to report that 130 people did – and here are the results. Overall, most of you were in favour of closing up the number and unit, with four fifths preferring ‘1.75cm’ to ‘1.75 cm’. However, this […]
07 / 05 / 14
Recently a reader asked us whether it was correct to put a space between a number and a unit (eg ‘4 cm’), or to close them up (‘4cm’). Well, what a can of contradictory worms that turned out to be. When it comes to units of measure, it seems some like to get up close […]
Posted by: Jacob Funnell
29 / 04 / 14
Having a website is a wonderful thing: it allows you to confuse and frustrate people thousands of miles away without ever having to hear their complaints. This makes it very hard to see what the problems are – and very tempting to pretend that they don’t exist. Your web pages don’t have to be like that. […]
18 / 03 / 14
The three little innocent-looking dots of an ellipsis (…) probably carry more power to annoy and confuse your readers than any other punctuation mark. Apostrophe mistakes look harmless in comparison. Nobody seriously reads ‘orange’s 45p’ and assumes that the orange must own a small amount of loose change. Ellipses, by contrast, can completely change the […]
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 […]
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