Writing links—Guest post on Comms Go Digital
Matt Murray has published a post I wrote about writing good link text on his blog, Comms Go Digital. Check it out. (And thanks, Matt!)
Ninja bookshop powers
My wife Minnie worked in a bookshop for years, from the age of 14, right up into university. This has given her special ninja bookshop powers.
Phonological processes—First language development
Talking is tricky. If you've ever fallen over your tongue trying to pronounce a new term, or just tried to speak too quickly, you'll know this. Because the act of speaking happens in near real time, and is so deeply ingrained in our muscle memory, we tend to forget that there are physical things to [...]
Don’t separate a subject from its verb
See this simple sentence: The dog bit the cat. It's built of these basic bits: The dog [subject] bit [verb] the cat [object]. You would never dream of putting a comma after the subject and before the verb: The dog, bit the cat. [No. You wouldn't do this, would you?] But when the subject is a longer noun phrase, many people (I catch myself sometimes) will want to add a comma after the subject, just it feels like there should be a pause...
Bad UX: mixed language content
My mother-in-law gave me a seed sprouter, because I mentioned that hers was a nice design. So now I (Minnie) have grown some fenugreek sprouts. Pretty tasty. The instructions, however, are rubbish. No-one seems to have thought about the person who would actually be reading them. They're broken up into multiple sections, with each of those [...]
Writing good error messages
To my ever-expanding frustration, and general astonishment (to which my wife expresses a weary kind of amazement: why are you so surprised, you know it does that...), things never seem to go entirely smoothly. (And if they do, I'm left with a trepidatious feeling that things in fact haven't gone smoothly, and that I just [...]
Coding passive voice detection
Several years back, my colleague Ben and I developed a Chrome extension for editorial quality assurance... then we thought, 'it'd be cool if this could detect passive voice'...
Rhyming slang: Raspberry, cobblers, and berk
As rhyming slang evolves, sometimes, the original meaning is forgotten, and we're left with a term that sounds like something your grandmother would say. But deep inside the expression's meaning, lies a kernel of something fantastically uncouth.
Prescriptivism, descriptivism and how tone affects meaning
I've been having a lively conversation with my friend Kevin, around the merits of certain grammatical rules. I seemed to have ended up in the descriptivist camp, while Kevin is representing the prescriptivists. Of course, the delineation is never that simple. I think there's more of a spectrum, with 'do whatever you want' at one [...]
House style, apostrophes, and why you can’t win
It’s a very tricky thing trying to position yourself as a 'writing expert'. You open yourself up to internet excoriation. Invariably, there will be errors that slip into some things (most things?) that you write, and other writing geeks will be keen to take aim at any error, perceived or actual. Grammar Girl, in her [...]