Blog Archives

A particular fondness for particles – ‘enter into’, ‘meet with’ and ‘mitigate against’

As anyone learning the language will tell you (usually through gritted teeth), English is inordinately fond of peppering its vocabulary with particles – those irritating little words that get added to verbs (mostly), altering the meaning in subtle, and often

Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary

Now, where did I put it? Misplaced modifiers and dangling participles

As a regular reader of this blog, we would like to offer you some really useful tips on structuring your sentences logically. Does anything grate as you read the above sentence? I hope so, because it should! It’s a classic

Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing

Practice makes perfect

Proofreaders find many different errors in documents (thankfully, or we’d be out of a job!). However, some are much more common than others, and one that we seem to see time and time again is the word ‘practice’ – or

Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing, Spelling, Vocabulary

It all depends on the prepositions

The other morning on my way in to work I passed the van of a pharmacy whose slogan is ‘Dispensing quality’, and some linguistically minded prankster had inserted ‘with’ between the two words, showing what a difference one small preposition

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Posted in Grammar, Proofreading/copy-editing, Vocabulary

Let’s not overexaggerate – avoiding tautology

Former US president George W Bush caused linguists much amusement/annoyance during his time in office for his skilful use of tautology. We have Dubya to thank for such unnecessary terms as ‘to misunderestimate’ and for incontestable pearls of wisdom such

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Posted in Proofreading/copy-editing