Minced oaths and the Victorian playboy still shaping English today
As a professional copywriter, I love unearthing the quirky links between common words and phrases and their historical origins.
Take a rain check on the clichés
Office-speak and clichés are so well established, it’s easy to play buzzword bingo in management meetings. It’s less difficult to spot in writing, but a very easy habit to fall into.
Say no to the splice
Commas are a really useful writing tool. You could compare them to taking a breath when writing a sentence. However, it's easy to go over the top and use them incorrectly.
Sentences are the new paragraphs
Brevity is a beautiful thing, but an increasingly used shortcut is becoming so ubiquitous it can no longer escape a little musing...
Do you really need all those words?
This month's writing tip is about less is more. Literally. It's about using fewer words to communicate more clearly and effectively.
Meeting the unmet needs of unnecessary words
Working in a copywriting agency and dealing with words from a variety of sources every day means you soon spot emerging (or fully emerged) trends in vocabulary and word use.
Want punchier writing? Don’t bury your verbs
Nominalisation is one of our pet hates. It's also one of the commonest ways in which writing falls down.
Can you tell a story in just six words?
You may have heard the tale of how, in the 1920s, Ernest Hemingway bet ten dollars that he could write a complete story in just six words. He wrote: "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn." He won the bet and often referred to the story as his best work ever.
Keep it simple like Leonardo
When he wasn't busy painting masterpieces or inventing helicopters, all-round-Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci found was one of the leading thinkers of his day.
What’s your favourite headline ever?
We've been doing some work on headline writing in our workshops recently. It reminded me of the story behind one of our favourite ever headlines …
Accessing new jargon
What is it with the word 'access' all of a sudden? You can't move these days without people 'accessing' education, 'accessing' information on the web, 'accessing' resources in the library, or 'accessing' lists of annoying words.
Should it be spelt with a ‘c’ or an ‘s’?
English is renowned for its quirky, often logic-defying spelling rules. Gives it character, a mark of our mongrel heritage, we're told. It doesn't make it any easier to write, though. One common area of confusion is when seemingly the same word has two spelling variations - one with a 'c', and one with an 's'.