Being a former foreign correspondent I thought I knew everything about jargon in journalism. For example, you’d door-step a cabinet meeting, hoping to get a comment from a minister once they came out. A sub editor at Reuters HQ in London would sub, i.e. edit, your story. But little did I know about online jargon until I stumbled on something called: “Roundtable on navigating the shifting landscape of content production.”
My pet hates 15 – Just don’t ramp me up
An obscure expression has crept into general parlance and seems to be replacing perfectly adequate words for no reason whatsoever. I’m referring to ramp up as in bolster, strengthen or increase. When did two words become preferable to one?
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British civil servants told to write proper English
The British Department for Transport has produced a guide that lists grammatical no-no’s for officials, according to newspaper reports. The instructions detail linguistic errors in official documents that annoy Justine Greening, the recently appointed Transport Secretary. I do welcome this initiative!
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Writing tip 15 – Beware of the spell-check
Last week I wrote about a survey that said separate is the most misspelled word in the English language, at least in Britain. Two out of three in the survey admitted that using spell-check on computers had made them lazy when writing letters or notes by hand. Here I must sound a word of warning.
Writing tip 14 – Want to look stupid? Misspell a word or two
Did you know that separate is the most misspelled word in English? This appears to be the case, at least in Britain, a survey shows. You won’t earn any points for spelling words correctly, but get it wrong a few times and your text will lose credibility.
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Writing tip 13 – U.S. and UK – separated by the same language
George Bernard Shaw apparently once described Britain and the United States as two countries separated by a common language. Of course, many things have different names in U.S. versus British English, for example sidewalk to an American is a pavement to a Brit. Spelling also differs many times, such as color and colour, but the problem arises when the parties use words that mean quite different things!
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My pet hates 14 – leaving out a crucial word to save space
There is a trend in writing, no doubt started on the Internet, to use incomplete sentences to confirm that an order has been dispatched, an installation has been completed or a product launched.
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Writing tip 12 – was your grandmother a boy?
There is a common mistake in writing that can best be described by this hilarious generic example: “As a boy, my grandmother used to read to me.” Surely, your grandmother was not a boy, but that is how it comes across.
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Writing tip 11 – a hyphen can change the meaning
For those of you who didn’t know it, London taxis are called black cabs. But what’s the difference between a black-cab driver and a black cab driver? Answer: the taxi driver is either just another driver of a black cab or a taxi driver who happens to be black. The hyphen makes all the difference.
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My pet hates 13 – reinventing ourselves, such a cliché…
There was a time when companies would simply adapt to new challenges, people would leave one job for another and organisations would introduce a change to regulations without being pretentious about it. Nowadays, however, many companies, people and organisations say they reinvent themselves.
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