Our changing language: are editors doomèd?
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…
Using “a” or “an” before an abbreviation
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…
I love reading copywriting blogs
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…
Which ranking factors are affected by copywriting?
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…
Companies, teams and organisations: singular or plural?
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…
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s infamous style guide
Well, who’d have thought it? One of the first controversies of the Johnson era hasn’t come from some unfortunate gaffe, but from an issue very close to writers’ and editors’ hearts: style guides. To bring…
Who needs About Us pages when there’s Wikipedia?
I often need to find out basic information about companies when I’m researching copywriting jobs – when they were formed, what they do, how they differ from competitors; that sort of thing. Obviously the first…
Stop WPForms emails being sent to your Gmail spam folder
If you’re having all your emails from WPForms sent to your spam box in Gmail, here’s a quick fix. The process will be similar for all forms plugins, but this post relates specifically to my…
Hyphens, en dashes and em dashes: how to use them
They might all look vaguely similar, but hyphens and dashes serve very different purposes. Here’s a quick rundown of their differences and how to use them. Hyphen ‐ The hyphen is shorter than both dashes…
Readability analysis: accept, consider, ignore?
Imagine the scene. A graphic designer submits some branding materials to a client. The client’s marketing guy feeds the image into a scanner and takes a sip of coffee as the computer does his its…