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I offer my singular condolence: Grammar
English demands that its users know more than just the meaning of a word. They also must know how it’s used. It’s not okay to slap just any words together. Some have special ‘partners’. While subbing an article yesterday, I happened upon the phrase ‘pay their condolences’. I knew instinctively that condolences were not paid.…
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I never knew children came in blue
Inspired by Sue de Groot’s column in the Sunday Times, I am writing about my own grammar gremlin findings of the past few days. In this period I read a lot of articles looking for answers to explain the looting, as I am sure many of you did. Sub-editor needed In one, I read about…
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Email accuracy is a must
Is email an art or science? If we consider science as accurately written text and art as anything slapped down on the page, then I would be persuaded to think that email leans towards the latter. I had a very hard learning experience working at a daily newspaper. With the prestigious title of deputy chief…
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Love what you do?
Loving what you do so that your never ‘work’ a day in your life is a luxury for the wealthy few. For the rest of us, it’s about learning a skill that we can apply to a craft – and that is still no guarantee of a livelihood. For writers, job opportunities have thinned down…
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6 Essentials of a Thought Leadership Article
Thought leadership is a relatively young term in the business environment, according to my sources, just 19 years old. Yet, it is one that is well-supported if Google’s 948 million return on search is anything to go by. The thought leaders of our time include Arianna Huffington, Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, among many, and my…
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7 Reasons to Connect with Influencers
Now, more than ever, influencer market is part of strategy. It’s all virtual but everybody is doing it and you need to know how to tap in. “It’s not WHAT you know, it’s WHO you know,” that takes you to places you could not get to without them. That’s why its important to network in…
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My top 10 in how to use capital letters
There’s nothing worse than being tripped up by capital letters. This means having to wade through a long piece of text crippled by incorrectly used capital letters, and not knowing the rules for how to use capital letters. It came to the fore again this week, when clients insisted that every job title was written…
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Hard to call someone a horse’s ass: idiom usage
Having said good-bye to the last of the Easter holiday makers in Durban, a coastal town in South Africa, we started to make our way home on Monday. On the way back we stopped at Van Reenen just off the N3 that runs between Johannesburg and the province, KwaZulu Natal. Named after the original farmer…
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See the scissors of the sub-editor
Where cash was once king, no-one wants to transact with hard currency, banks charge a fortune for handling the dirty lucre and it’s certainly not safe to be walking around with a stash in your back pocket. Have no fear – CONTENT is the new king. Content is the king of the ‘interverse’. Everybody wants…
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Debug your grammar gremlin
In my job, as sub-editor at a community newspaper, I had to reprimand a reporter for shoddy work. His report was submitted for subbing with several repeated paragraphs. When I pointed this out to him, he swore it was a systems error. This was highly unlikely and even if it was, he should have made…
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