The Read-Write Debate

Should we write as we speak or speak as we write?
 
According to Jyoti Sanyal, author of “Indlish—the book for every English-Speaking Indian”, this debate has been going on for centuries. He says that written English began as a write-as-you speak movement. Casual, simple writing was encouraged. A good example of this is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury [...]

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New Words in the English Lexicon

Bucknor: (n) (adj)
1. Temporary blindness leading to missing out on the obvious.
2. To be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
3. Situations leading to grave judgmental errors.
Usage: I feel bucknored by my boss;  Life often throws a bucknor at you.
Benson: (n) (adj)
1. Something that legitimises a severe bucknor.
Usage: First they bucknored me [...]

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Top Ten Tips on Business Writing

It doesn’t take much to improve the quality of most business writing. Just muttering “shorter, clearer, stronger” in each editor’s ear twice a day will take you a surprisingly long way.
This down-to-earth “how-to” guide for editors and writers will take you a long way in the right direction.

Know who your readers are.
Consumers or businesses, sales [...]

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Interaction with American clients: Useful tips

Here’s an e-mail I received, which provides useful tips while interacting with American clients.

1.Do not write “the same” in an email – it makes little sense to them.
   Example – I will try to organize the project artifacts and inform you of the same when it is done.
   This is somewhat an Indian construct. [...]

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Interesting facts about English

China has more English speakers than the United States .
The sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every
letter in the english language. (Sentences containing every letter of the alphabet are called
“pangrams”, or “holalphabetic sentences”.)
“Bookkeeper” is the only word in English language with three consecutive
double letters.
Colgate faced a big obstacle [...]

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Evolving English

Here’s a popular forwarded message doing the rounds:
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- [...]

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Dropping the hyphen

Here’s an article about how the hyphen is being dropped from most words these days…officially.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7004661.stm

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Why are there silent letters in English spelling?

Etymology is the reason there are so many silent letters in English spelling. Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they are spelled. There was a genuine belief that it would help people if they could ’see’ the [...]

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The Great Vowel Shift

A series of changes affecting the long vowels of English, known as the Great Vowel Shift, took place in the early 1400s. Before the shift, a word like loud would have been pronounced ‘lood’, name as ‘nahm’, leaf as ‘layf’, mice as ‘mees’. Although the shift had no clear beginning or end, the majority of [...]

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100 Most Mispronounced Words

Here’s a list of 100 most mispronounced words:
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html

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