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A while back, in one of my more interesting freelancing contracts, I was approached by a large multinational company and asked to work with its UK CEO. My task was to make the way he communicated more acceptable to the Americans (in particular), who hoped sooner or later to appoint...

The old adage has it that any editor worth their salt should be able to get any text into a fit state for publication, regardless of its subject matter. An editor with an academic specialism in languages and the humanities should be able to sort out a typescript on quantum...

A few weeks ago I handed in my finished typescript for an e-grammar course to the Publishing Training Centre (PTC). The PTC is an agency I’ve had the good fortune to work with for some time now, and the e-grammar course is an electronic expansion of two courses I’ve run...

How do you react when you come across something that’s very similar to something you’d been planning to do? A book you’d had an idea for, or an article you were aiming to write – or just an opinion you fondly imagined you were going to be the first to...

It was a sense of confusion about the past and future that got me thinking about this. I was listening to the news featuring yet another story about what some politician was going to be saying that day, and wondering when this pre-announcement of speeches first started. What was the...

It strikes me that people don’t think enough about what person they’re going to write a piece in – or, if they do, they don’t then think enough about the different effects they might achieve if they were to write the piece in a different person. The choice of person...

I worry about consistency. Yes, I know, it’s what you’d expect an editor to do. But I worry about it in a different sense, too. I worry about the fact that I worry about it.In my first publishing job, I had a petty tyrant as my production controller. Every transfer...

“I trust I make myself obscure?” I loved this line (from Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons) when I first saw the great Paul Scofield say it in Fred Zinnemann’s film of the play (the play has some other wonderful lines and exchanges, including one between Thomas More and...

Difficult to avoid saying ‘And not before time’ to this piece of news, which is now a couple of months old.The Queen’s English Society (QES) is, or rather was (how good is it to write that!), one of those pressure groups that always seemed to get an undeserved amount of...

This advertisement is over 40 years old, so it can be forgiven for looking a bit long in the tooth. That plate of food – is it intended as the acme of gastronomic sophistication, or an example of the kind of food most likely to be infested by flies? Clearly,...

Puns and double meanings are the stock in trade of advertisements, of course, but not all of them work. This one does, though it comes dangerously close to smugness at times. But there’s much to like here. There’s the way in which the first line of the text finishes so...

‘Consistency is all I ask!’ is what Rosencrantz cries out in exasperation in Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (ungrammatically, surely – isn’t it ‘Consistency is all I ask for’?). I often think that this should be the collective motto of editors, although technically, I suppose, it should...

People who work freelance may be grateful for any advice they can find in these economically difficult times. Lots of people we talk to complain that there is less work around than ever and that what work there is is being offered at a lower rate and by clients who...

There are two charges that are regularly laid at the door of anyone attempting to reduce an unnecessarily complex piece of writing and give it a clearer, simpler form: the first is that what is being done involves ‘dumbing down’ language and expression; the second is that it is ‘patronising’....

One of the confusing things about this is the central image. The black coffee and (empty) pad and pen (pen? not pencil or biro?) is intended presumably to represent a police interview desk, borrowing from any number of tired TV stereotypes; but what’s the picture in the middle? Why...

There is so much here that could be improved. For one thing, the heading fails to explain what the text below it will be about: ‘What should you do in an emergency?’ might be better than the far-too-general ‘safety information’. Then the sub-headings fail to build on the initial...

So what’s the point of this poster? It’s to reduce the number of assaults on rail staff, arguably to draw to the public’s attention the fact that this is a daily occurrence. But that information is to be found only in the smaller text in the final quarter of...

A number of things don’t work as well as they should here. The dotted background doesn’t make the writing clearer and is actually a potential distraction and irritation for certain readers (try it with anyone who’s dyslexic, for example). I guess the writers thought it made the leaflet feel a...

This hugely successful campaign is also an example of things that can go wrong when you condense information. For one thing, what’s ‘it’? It’s never explained; the only item referred to in the more-detailed text is ‘germs’, which is plural and would therefore suggest it should be ‘catch them’ –...

I’m not going to come over all Lynne Truss about this. The apostrophe is, like many punctuation marks, something that is not quite as black-and-white as people imagine. And there are worse writing crimes than missing an apostrophe. But it is nevertheless such a basic mistake to make that...

As someone who has been on both sides of the editing desk, I feel quite familiar with the standard opening moves in the negotiating game played out between writer and editor, both of whom tend to think that they know what is best for the piece of writing they’re...

I can’t really see how people don’t know of him or haven’t read any of his many publications, if only because the guy is so prolific and so clearly the go-to expert for any subject relating to language – but whenever I mention his name in courses or seminars there...

I often wonder whether any writing would not be improved if people spent more time planning it and reading through it once they’d completed it. What’s clear is that I’d lose a huge chunk of my consultancy and training work. So much of that part of what I do, I’m...

Most of the time it’s relatively easy to track where certain widely used words and expressions have come from. Doing so will normally explain why they have acquired such apparent sudden popularity – and why they have also managed to acquire considerable unpopularity in other quarters. Terms such as ‘going...

I wonder how many people buy Ronseal products. Quite a few, I’d guess, from my occasional visits to hardware stores, but I’d wager that more people by far would be able to come up with the company’s strapline when asked to. It’s something the company seems to be proud of,...

I share an e-mail account with my partner and children, and often find that I have mysteriously been added to the subscription list for e-mail announcements from companies I’ve never knowingly done business with. A large part of my time seems to be taken up with unsubscribing myself from these...

How do you react when you come across something that’s very similar to something you’d been planning to do? A book you’d had an idea for, or an article you were aiming to write – or just an opinion you fondly imagined you were going to be the first to...