What are dangling modifiers? How do we fix them?

See the following link and you’ll know: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/597/1/

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Handy English Language Presentations

If you are a copy editor or English language expert who has been asked to give a presentation on English grammar, here’s a useful link for you. This link contains several English grammar presentations that you can use to “teach” your colleagues. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/powerpoint.htm

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Homophones – What are they? A quick test to see where you stand.

According to Wikipedia, “A homophone is a word that is pronounced the same as another word but differs in meaning. The words may be spelled the same, such as rose (flower) and rose (past tense of “rise”), or differently, such as carat, caret, and carrot, or to, two, and too. Homophones that are spelled the [...]

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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 [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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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