The unholy see

The Telegraph stylebook says: see: only an animate object can see anything. Avoid tabloid usages such as “last year saw a sharp increase in the number of deaths” where saw is a lazy substitute for resulted in, caused or simply “there were”. Bravo. We get this sort of thing a lot: “2007 saw street parties [...]

Do not fear the delusional bugbears

Lisa McLendon of Grammar Monkeys asked on Twitter for people to suggest nutty non-rules of grammar – that is, things that certain people insist on but that aren’t really rules of grammar. These are usually things that a parent or English teacher has drilled into one’s head at an early age, that don’t have any clear [...]

Catch-22

In the middle of a large, urgent, high-profile publishing project beset by version control problems, the client emails the designer and me a hitherto-unmentioned 14,000-word appendix to the report we’ve been grappling with. Alarum. But apparently it may not be that big a deal: I don’t think there is any need for a proof read [...]

Enhance your green credentials: recycle a cliché today!

The environment matters. A lot. But not as much as whether politicians are getting one up on each other. This is why so much political reporting of environmental policy is cast in terms of the changing image of this party or that minister – a priority most clearly, and unattractively, distilled by the phrase “green [...]

Twenty-Four

I can’t help but feel that ‘24’ would have been more dramatically and commercially successful if Jack Bauer had been a copyeditor… Caption/VO: The following events take place between 12am, which isn’t a real time, and either 1am or 1pm depending on whether 12am was supposed to mean midnight or noon. [Counter-Typo Unit, Los Angeles. [...]

The true meaning

We are already planning our corporate Christmas card. The “basic objectives” for this project are: To wish all external stakeholders a happy Christmas and to strengthen stakeholder relationships. To showcase the Blenkinsop Foundation in a celebratory and festive fashion.  I’m trying as hard as I can to resist proposing this text for the card:  We [...]