Author: foolproof

The advantages of commissioning a sole trader I’ve been mulling the merits of engaging a freelance copy-editor over employing the services of an editorial consultancy. Here are my conclusions: •…

Friends say I’m a grammar nerd, yet grammar plays such a minor role in editorial decisions. By far the greatest number of changes a copy-editor makes to a manuscript concern…

It was with equal parts excitement and terror that I moved north, after spending almost exactly half my life in the south. The first example of normality (‘normalcy’) was in…

We each have talents. Stuff we’re really good at, subjects at which we excelled at school. Subjects we didn’t have to study because their content was hugely interesting to us.…

Today’s news declared that northerners should modify their accents (http://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/may/12/trainee-teachers-from-northern-england-told-to-modify-their-accents). We’ve been here before. Being a northerner, I have come up against this prejudice since I travelled south in 1987.…

This short article concerns neither the labour ward nor jealous spouses. It’s about apostrophes. Apostrophes are tedious, insignificant, fiddly punctuation marks, right? Well, no, they’re indicators that tell us if a word…

Lax grammar, misspellings and shoddy punctuation cause confusion in some instances (the man eating tiger/the man-eating tiger) and feelings ranging from alienation to distrust in others. Let's face it, poor language use is…

Words that until the popularity of the home computer were the preserve of the printer are nowadays bandied about with nary a thought for their derivation. Their etymology deserves due respect.…