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Advice and tips
Posted by: em-admin
01 / 02 / 13
In my previous article for Emphasis, I looked at long and short words and their relative merits, writes Stan Carey. One place where shorter is usually better is Twitter, where everyone has to stick to the 140-character limit – unless you use a tweet extension service, and where’s the fun in that? Many tweets contain […]
Posted by: Cathy Dann
14 / 01 / 13
If you already know the difference between stationery and stationary, you’ll probably have felt the urge to indulge yourself in the kind of graffiti pictured, writes Cathy Relf. (No? Just me?) If you don’t already know the difference, it’s this: stationery refers to writing materials, while stationary means ‘not moving’. The most frequent mistake people […]
01 / 01 / 13
Is your writing feeling a bit flabby and out of shape? Treat it to a one-month detox treatment by following these three rules. Get active The active voice is more direct, dynamic and accountable. ‘The Government took no action’ is better than ‘No action was taken’ or ‘No action was taken by the Government’. It’s […]
20 / 12 / 12
Times are changing for local government. Staff numbers are falling because of budget cuts, the localism agenda means that councils will soon be taking an increased responsibility for public health and reports now have a shorter journey from draft stage to centre stage. The secret of success is understanding your audience, writes Emma Beals. You […]
18 / 12 / 12
Is singular they OK? Dear Madam or Sir I have just discovered your excellent website and begun perusing some of your articles. In the one by Jack Elliot on technical writing I noticed one linguistic point that we (translators at a company in Germany) often discuss but cannot always agree on. Jack writes: ‘An automotive […]
Can you ‘speak to’ the issues? Hi Emphasis I love the e-bulletin and have a question for you: in US circles, and increasingly in UK contexts too, I hear the term ‘speak to [the issues]’ to mean something like ‘make reference to [the issues]’ – eg ‘the report speaks to the issue of unemployment’. Is […]
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