“You must not start a sentence with a conjunction.” That has been the mantra of many an exasperated English teacher, especially since the oiks started getting state education. Any pupil brave, daft or naive enough to raise a hand and ask “Why?” would receive some explanation along the lines of “Because it is said.” So […]
Perfection. It does exist, in certain realms. Think of the piston in an engine sized precisely to fit in its cylinder. The evolution of the shark. A hole in one (or 18 of them in a single round). The arrangement of the studs on a Lego brick. They are measurably, objectively and provably impossible to […]
An article by David Shariatmadari in the Guardian has inspired a bit of a buzz these past few days. It’s about the mutability of language, and how the quest for perfect English is a forlorn one. Read “Why it’s time to stop worrying about the decline of the English language” here (it’ll only take about […]
Should we say “an NHS doctor” or “a NHS doctor”? There are two schools of thought on this subject: “vocalisation of the abbreviation” and “vocalisation of the first word”. Abbreviation verbalised By this rule, if the abbreviation starts with a letter that starts with a vowel when vocalised, the article used is “an”; if it […]
I love reading copywriting blogs. I even said it in the title. Especially the ones that use short sentences. One sentence to a paragraph. One word to a sentence. (No. I wouldn’t read that.) Because copywriting is about paring down, not padding out. Everybody knows that. Time is precious. But sometimes I wonder What isn’t […]
Because everybody wants their website to rank highly on Google, the SEO industry is now as important to companies as traditional marketing and PR always were. The boundaries are so blurred that most companies in one of these sectors usually seek to have expertise in the other two. To rank highly is to appear on […]
A subject that never goes away is whether organisations should be treated as singulars or plurals. That is, whether we should say: Tesco is the UK’s largest retail company or Tesco are the UK’s largest retail company In this example, it seems pretty straightforward. The first reads more naturally and makes more sense. There’s no […]