Yearly Archives: 2017

Full stop? Or not?

Is Mr. and Mrs. acceptable or not? No… this is not a posting on the merits of marriage! It’s about the full stop at the end of ‘Mr.’ or ‘Mrs.’. Do we need it? There are other examples too, of

Posted in Uncategorized

Defining things or adding information? – Correcting relative clauses

Everybody loves a quiz, don’t they? Well, if you do, read on. Relative clauses (sentence components starting with ‘who’, ‘which’, ‘that’, ‘whom’ or ‘whose’) are quite possibly one of the most confusing areas of English grammar. Just when you think

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Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing

Apostrophe catastrophes

Considering it is no more than a squiggle – a comma suspended in mid-air – it’s amazing how much trouble the humble apostrophe can cause. Most commonly used with an ‘s’, it can wreak grammatical havoc in a number of

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Posted in Punctuation

Who is Hugh Jackilometresan? – The Dangers of Find and Replace

Players of Trivial Pursuit have been amused and baffled in recent years by the inclusion of a question about that well-known Australian actor Hugh Jackilometresan. Find and replace the space In a previous blog post, we sang the praises of

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Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Spelling, Style

You spell it potarto, I spell it potayto…

Although it is not certain who was the first to describe the USA and the UK as ‘two countries divided by a common language’, there is no doubt they were right when it came to spelling. The many subtle differences

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Posted in Spelling