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Advice and tips
Posted by: Cathy Dann
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 […]
Posted by: Richard Smyth
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: 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 […]
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 […]
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