1. You talk about yourself How many times have you seen this? 'Barratt and Bloggins was formed in 1982 and has successfully been delivering award-winning cutting edge solutions for our clients for the last 25 years.' Blah, blah, blah. Here’s the thing: people visiting your website only care about themselves. They want to know what you’re going to do for them; how quickly you’re...
This week saw the 30th Plain English Campaign award ceremony, held at The Brewery, London, honouring the best and worst in written communications. There was the imaginatively named Web Award for the ‘clearest website’, won this year by the Financial Ombudsman Service. Whilst The Daily Telegraph, BBC Radio 1, and Birmingham Mail were all winners in the media category for excellent journalism. But...
I was watching Stephen Fry’s QI show on TV last night. And the subject of possessive apostrophes in place names, such as King’s Cross Road or Marshall’s Place, came up. Of course, it was only last year that Birmingham City Council did away with apostrophes in their place names. So out goes St Paul’s Square and St Mary’s Road and in...
Want to know what this year’s best word is? Tweep? Obamamania? Jedward? Nah. It’s ‘unfriend’. Blimey. How brutal. Last week, The New Oxford American Dictionary chose ‘unfriend’ – a verb meaning to remove someone as a friend on a social networking site like Facebook – as its word of the year. And what linguistic luminaries did it beat? How about ‘sexting’,...
