‘Sure, if I reprehend any thing in this world it is the use of my oracular tongue, and a nice derangement of epitaphs!’ Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals Fortunately, few speakers or writers, real or fictional, misuse words to…
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The whys, wherefores, therefores and therebys
‘O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?’ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene ii This famous question must be the most misinterpreted line in all of the Bard’s many works. Students across the generations have taken it…
Tagged with: adverb, adverbs, relative pronoun, relative pronouns
Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary
Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary
Difficulties with ‘and’
I’d like you to understand, doctor. I grant you it’s easy enough to choose between a ‘but’ and an ‘and.’ It’s a bit more difficult to decide between ‘and’ and ‘then.’ But definitely the hardest thing may be to know…
Tagged with: conjunctions, connectives, connectors, linking words
Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing
Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing
Go easy on the exclamation marks!
A December blog post seems the perfect opportunity to wish you ‘Merry Christmas!’ or ‘Happy Holidays!’ (depending on your beliefs or lack of), and also to reflect on the use and overuse of the exclamation mark. According to some sources1,…
Tagged with: bang, exclamation mark, exclamation point
Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Punctuation
Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Punctuation
Reference – pronouns and the importance of human proofreaders
I wrote in a previous blog post (Plausible typos and homophones) about the continued importance of human proofreaders and their superiority (for now) over computers. Another area where humans’ use of contextual inference outperforms machines’ analysis is the grammatical issue…
Tagged with: machine translation, pronoun, pronouns, reference
Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing, Reference
Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing, Reference