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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. […]
Posted by: Richard Smyth
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: Cathy Dann
29 / 02 / 12
One of our members of staff recently phoned his GP practice and asked to see a specific doctor. ‘Sorry, he only comes in pro re nata,’ the receptionist told him. It wasn’t until he’d put the phone down and looked up the phrase that he knew for sure what she had meant, writes Cathy Relf. […]
Posted by: Catie Holdridge
27 / 03 / 11
Good writing is powerful. Bad writing belongs in Room 101. George Orwell, creator of that fictional torture chamber where people’s worst nightmares reside, determined to rid the world of the terrible writing habits he believed threatened our mother tongue. The six rules he laid out have been guiding writers in all fields since he wrote […]
07 / 03 / 11
Jargon can bring clarity for experts and irritation for laypeople, but could it sometimes be life threatening? Yes, according to the coroner heading up the inquest into the London terrorist attacks of 7 July 2005, Lady Justice Hallett. Simple impatience with unclear terms is a more serious problem when it comes to understanding the situation […]
14 / 02 / 11
They say money talks. But why does financial language so often leave the poor reader in need of subtitles? Since the credit crunch, the thorny issue of finance has dominated the media. If only we all had a euro for every story we’d read on the subject, we’d all have far fewer financial concerns. And […]
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