Has anyone recently praised your culinary skills or your sartorial elegance? Have you spotted scantily clad females performing to serried ranks of spectators? If so, I hope nobody wrote it down. Phrases like these are almost always meant to be semi-humorous; when they were first used, they were probably more interesting than the alternative, and … Continue reading Are you disguising bad writing with sugarplums?

Warning: This article is about reading distressing and intense material, so it refers to some examples. I was reading about someone dying in a hospice. I suddenly realised I had just said something like: ‘Does this mean they had cancer and Parkinson’s? Then the comma should be here, and not there.’ It felt extremely callous … Continue reading Is there a comma after death? Proofreading emotional writing

Hyphens are usually used to join compound words – like zero-tolerance, or make-or-break. But some compound words go without hyphens – either by remaining as two words, like ‘hit man’ and ‘lamp post’, or by becoming a single word, like 'stakeholder' and 'groundsheet'. There are a few rules about when a compound word should be … Continue reading Hyphens in compound words

‘She’s a nightmare! Honestly! No wonder she hasn’t got any friends!’ That is how Ron Weasley feels about Hermione Granger correcting his pronunciation when they are learning the levitation spell ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ early in the first Harry Potter story. It is an iconic moment, because it leads directly to the climax of that story, and … Continue reading Harry Potter and the annoyance of correction

The sun sets in the west, and looks spectacular over the River Thames. So if you live in the City, head to East London, find an open space by the river, and look back across the city. What is going on here? The words river and city, and compass points, are capitalised in one place … Continue reading Capitalisation

I recently passed the standard proofreading training, ‘Basic Proofreading’, with the Publishing Training Centre. Training as a proofreader goes beyond getting better at spotting mistakes; beyond knowing what is and isn’t a mistake. Here are some simple lessons anyone can apply to whatever they are writing: Consistency Sometimes consistency matters more than right and wrong. … Continue reading Simple checking you can do

There is huge variation in the standard of work a proofreader checks. Some scripts have been so thoroughly corrected before I see them that I am relieved to find an error or two. Even then, I have wondered if they were put there to test me – surely 'stationery' and 'compliment' are such classic easily-confused … Continue reading What a proofreader can do for a dissertation

Some mistakes are unambiguous and simply need to be corrected. Some things are less clear. If I’m checking an academic piece, I’m not going to check the names of all the authors you quote, let alone the date and title of their work. Although I suppose I could quote for doing that if you’d really … Continue reading What counts as a mistake?

Two lovely black eyes! Oh, what a surprise! Only for telling a man he was wrong – two lovely black eyes! I feel an affinity for the man who wrote this song over 130 years ago, and performed it in East End Music Halls for many years afterwards. For one thing, Charles Coborn took his … Continue reading Two lovely black eyes!

The Guardian newspaper had, for a long time, a reputation for misprints – hence its nickname, The Grauniad. You don’t hear that so often nowadays, except in ‘Private Eye’, which amuses its readers (or is it just its own writers?) with many such ‘adapted’ names, such as Piers Moron, Jeffrey Archhole and the Guardian’s one-time … Continue reading Goodbye Grauniad, hello pishbulers