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A work colleague asked me how to spell this word yesterday and I replied quite confidently that it was ‘supercede’ but then (feeling a blog coming on) I decided to look it up to confirm. I was amazed with what I found. I then asked the next seven people that I spoke to (and they … Continue reading
The Pocket Writer’s Handbook by Martin Mander & Stephen Curtis explains that although the word ‘may’ is the traditional way of saying ‘be allowed to’ (when asking permission to do something) the word ‘can’ meaning ‘be able to’ is often used instead. The difference is shown in the following examples: “May I have a sweet?” (Am … Continue reading
The Oxford Dictionaries online http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/cannot explains that “both the one-word form cannot and the two-word form can not are acceptable, but cannot is more common”. There are, however, occasions where the word ‘can’ needs to be separated from ‘not’. This is where the word ‘not’ belongs to another part of the sentence. Consider the following three examples: I … Continue reading
The ‘Oxford comma’ is also known as the ‘serial comma’, or the ‘final comma’. The Oxford Dictionaries online http://oxforddictionaries.com/page/oxfordcomma explains that “the ‘Oxford comma’ is an optional comma before the word ‘and’ at the end of a list”. It was given this name because it was “traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford … Continue reading
FIRST PERSON When writing in the first person you would use the following pronouns: First person singular pronoun = I First person plural pronoun = we Example: I like the new wine bar. How many times do we have to tell you. The Pocket Writer’s Handbook (Penguin Reference Library) explains that the first person is also used to … Continue reading
When preparing bullet points and lists, you may be confused by the following: whether to put a colon at the end of the sentence introducing your list. whether to capitalise the first word of each bullet point. what punctuation mark to put at the end of each each bullet point. how to end your last bullet point. … Continue reading
I’m not in the habit of putting spaces before an exclamation mark, question mark, colon or semicolon, but I have seen others do it in emails and other typed pieces of work. My work colleague asked me to blog about this as it’s one of his pet hates! Here are a few examples of the … Continue reading
Hopefully is a misused adverb meaning “with hope”, according to Strunk & White in their book The Elements of Style. Strunk & White explains that this meaning “has been distorted and is now widely used to mean ‘I hope’ or ‘it is to be hoped’”. Here are some examples in sentences: I will get to … Continue reading
This blog is about clauses that are introduced by the word which and the rules around commas when the clause follows a noun. As this can get a little confusing, first you need to decide if the clause that follows which is either “used to introduce crucial identifying pieces of information” or “used in clauses … Continue reading
A cliché is a phrase or expression that someone somewhere has expressed as an original thought which becomes overused. According to Graham King in his book Collins Improve your Writing, some clichés go back centuries, for example, left in the lurch dates back to 1576 and comes from the English poet Gabriel Harvey. It’s common to … Continue reading
My Writing Notebook 