My latest plan is to rewrite underperforming and sloppy English on websites. And get paid lavishly for it. Many websites are nice in technical design, but clumsy in expression. No surprise there. The capacity of people in the UK to write sharp, accurate English is plummeting. Good grammar and good writing […]
Responding to my posting below about poor website writing, a reader makes the following argument: My feeling is that poor use of language isn’t actually the problem: it’s a symptom of sloppy thinking. Interesting chicken and egg issue here. Does poor command of language reflect sloppy thinking, or create it? No doubt […]
What makes for brilliant writing, in English at least? A subtle combination of perhaps three big things. Clarity, Energy and Wisdom. Clarity of message, combined with clarity in delivering it. Energy in both thought and language. Wisdom in cutting through the infinite hubbub of facts and arguments out there and looking bluntly at things that […]
A reader prompted by my Nagorno-Karabakh posting writes: I was interested in the part of this post where you refer to the negotiations between Armenia and Azerbaijan and in particular the Russian negotiator’s cabinet of diplomatic curiosities and arguments over the placing of commas and use of the word ‘the’. (Reminiscent of […]
Former Weatherman Bill Ayers explains himself – in a (not very) comic strip: Way to go cool 1960s’ Radical Left politics ("I don’t think violent resistance is necessarily the answer…") albeit a bit gaunt now. Need to work on the grammar of that final sentence, Bill. But he does manage […]
Analysis/comment on Georgia/Russia gushes out. EU leaders meet tomorrow. Hence we have the latest UK positions as described by Foreign Secretary David Miliband and (today) Prime Minister Gordon Brown. These senior British statements are both alas inelegantly drafted. Who is preparing these texts for our leaders – and are they themselves […]
My former colleague Craig Murray posts at some length about Andrew Mackinlay MP including the allegedly shocking FCO libel against him that he frequented Warsaw strip clubs. This, says Craig, shows the perfidy of how MI6 and the FCO in alliance with New Labour are attacking Andrew Mackinlay for his robust […]
Tim Worstall (again!) links to a couple of examples of Pollard-like behaviour, namely hiding messages in a seemingly normal text. This has been done in the FCO too, of course. Telegrams have been sent with the first or last letter of each new line spelling out a cryptic message. Plus […]
Back on languages again. Slav languages make a distinction in their verbs between Perfective and Imperfective ‘aspects’. Thus in Russian/Serbian/Polish there are different verb forms denoting (a) when an action has been done and is now complete, and (b) when an action is continuing or repeated. Here is a fairly straightforward […]
