E-EDIT.CO.UK

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Monday, January 17, 2005. One major aspect of the e-editor's work that is never written about or discussed in polite society is the way lists are handled. Yet how an e-editor chooses to present listed material can make a huge difference to the impact and clarity of the final communication. There are potent cultural assumptions embedded in the reader's response to any list. Listing the EU states alphabetically is fair enough in the rarefied milieu of Brussels and Strasbourg protocols and diplomacy. In...

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Monday, December 27, 2004. An e-mail from an E-EDITOR enthusiast in Brisbane alerts us to bad news for fans of Bullfighter the unique bullshit-hunting, jargon-shaming software distributed free of charge by Deloitte Consulting. Just 18 months after Bullfighter came along to save the world from a million lousy, pompous, overblown travesties of the art of business communication, Deloitte has withdrawn support for this excellent initiative. We recognised the marketing and branding benefits Deloitte derived f...

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Sunday, September 05, 2004. It's been a funny sort of year. Those readers who detected a note of tension and underlying menace in our last post, written over a glass of ouzo in an Internet cafe looking out on a serene and glorious beach, were actually completely wrong as far as any of the e-editor team could possibly know at the time. The Times believed its own clumsy analysis of stylistic and punctuational quirks in this weblog and Belle's proved they came from the same hand thus confirming e-editor's p...

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Friday, February 20, 2004. Heartening news from San Francisco on Tuesday, where the decisive point in the first round of the legal row about same-sex marriages turned on a punctuation mark. The way you've written this, it has a semi-colon where it should have the word 'or'," Superior Court Judge James Warren told conservatives who had drafted an application for a "cease and desist" order to stop the weddings of gay and lesbian couples. But it was the sheer blank idiocy of tacking on that phrase "to show ...

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Monday, November 29, 2004. Any fool can learn to write for an audience. Or, at least, anybody can learn the techniques of analysing a brief or sampling the tone of past publications to make a new piece of writing match the readers' requirements. We were once involved in creating a style guide for 40,000 BT managers, which we called Right for Your Reader. Great title, we thought, feeling proud of having declined the obvious pun. We went through all the routine sections about abbreviations and greengrocers...

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Monday, August 02, 2004. Wary blogging is not the best blogging. For reasons that cannot be disclosed here, we are having to be more, er, circumspect in the venting of opinions and the mounting of personal and easily recognisable hobbyhorses. In practice, that means a certain amount of self-censorship and, inevitably, fewer impulsive, spur-of-the-moment postings. But many of these corporate verbal tics are so outrageous and perverse that they immediately identify particular companies. They have becom...

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Wednesday, March 31, 2004. Hell It was just three weeks ago that we were writing about Alistair Cooke's decision to give up Letter from America, and now he's dead. Looking back at the 9th March posting, we think it stands as a pretty good epitaph to the great talker's skills and talent. One point we didn't mention then, though, which was well made in the excellent Radio 4 obituary programme today, was how deliberately Cooke developed a spoken, rather than written, style. Para; 12:14 am. Top of the list w...

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Sunday, April 18, 2004. After the brief flurry of interest in the odd Shakespearean word "concernancy", when Alistair Cooke used it in his very last Letter from America, we have seen another obscure 16th-century noun disinterred and given an airing in the last few weeks. The new old word is "incuriosity". In particular, there has been criticism of Bush's lack of interest in an August 2001 CIA presidential briefing headed "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US". The sudden popularity of this archaic term h...