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According to John Seely in his book the Oxford A-Z of Grammar & Punctuation, you use “shall with I and we”, i.e. the first person singular and plural and you use “will with all other persons” e.g. he will and they will. Here are some examples to illustrate this: I shall be at the cinema at 8pm, if you want to join me. … Continue reading
There is a distinct (discrete) difference between the words discreet and discrete although (according to the Daily Writing Tips website http://www.dailywritingtips.com/the-difference-between-discreet-and-discrete/) “both discreet and discrete derive from the same Latin word discretus” which means separated or distinct. DISCREET The Pocket Writer’s Handbook by Martin Mander & Stephen Curtis defines discreet as: Careful Unlikely to attract attention Examples in … Continue reading
“It was raining cats and dogs” is a well-known idiom and although the phrase does mean it’s raining heavily, it has nothing to do with cats and dogs, according to book The Queen’s English. In his book Bernard C Lamb explains that “in idioms, the words taken together have a different meaning from their separate literal meanings”. My … Continue reading
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
My Writing Notebook 