Recently I read a piece that compared a good writer to a sculptor. A sculptor cuts away what’s useless to make her piece more expressive. So it should be with good writing. You need to cut away the useless stuff to make your words count. In writing, as in all art, ‘less is more’. Let’s […]
Clear and Simple Writing
Punctuating Bulleted Lists #FridayReflections
What do you do when you have to share complicated information? Use Bulleted lists. They are a great way of breaking down information into bite-sized bits. Punctuating Bulleted Lists There are different ways to punctuate lists. Here are the most common ways of punctuating them as suggested by The Plain English Campaign. A list in […]
Question Tags #FridayReflections
“Question tags are simple, isn’t it?” You see that there’s something wrong with that sentence, don’t you? Using ‘isn’t it’ as a question tag is quite a common error among Indian speakers of English. What are question tags? The short questions we put at the end of our sentences especially in spoken English. Question tags […]
Special Or Especial #WYHO
When do you use ‘special’ (‘specially’) and when do you use ‘especial’ (‘especially’)? I sometimes get confused. So I thought I’d share my bit of research on this with you today. Special or Especial 1. especially and specially Especially and specially can often both be used with the same meaning. It was not […]
See Look And Watch #MondayMusings
See look and watch. They are not synonyms, but I’ve often observed people confusing them. 1.see See is the ordinary verb to say that something ‘comes to our eyes’, whether or not we are paying attention. Suddenly I saw that man from the movie. (Not ‘Suddenly I look at […]
Beside The Point
It’s been a while since we had one of our Clear and Simple Writing posts. I keep meaning to do them and then put them off. I guess I suffer from blogcrastination sometimes! But that’s beside the point. Or is it ‘besides the point’? Yes, we’re looking how the words ‘beside’ and ‘besides’ often get […]
