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Inspiring news, insights and comments from the 8020 team.
Express Yourself: Oops! That’s not what I meant
Blogs
Media - 14th June 2012
Express Yourself: Oops! That’s not what I meant

We all stumble harmlessly over our words occasionally, especially after a few lunchtime whiskies. Less forgivably, however, we sometimes choose the wrong words even when sober, particularly when two similar ...

blogs interrobang-226×300.jpg
Miscellaneous - 11th November 2011
Express Yourself: The wonderful world of interrobangs and sarcastrophes

The origins of punctuation date back to ancient Greece, when dramatists like Aristophanes found a need to visually indicate pauses to actors reading and learning scripts. A system of dots, ...

Blogs
Media - 14th June 2011
Express Yourself: the wasted word

One of the goals of print journalism is concision. Student journalists are often told to imagine a businessman reading a newspaper on the way to work. As his train nears ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 2nd March 2011
Express Yourself: Divided opinions about the split infinitive

As you no doubt remember fondly from your schooldays, the infinitive is essentially the basic version of a verb, such as “to eat” or “to speak”. There is a very ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 27th January 2011
Better Writing in 2011: Our Top Five List Of Fings Wot Not To Do

People will remember 2010 for many reasons. We saw a coalition government in the UK for the first time since 1945. England’s footballers went to the World Cup in South ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 28th October 2010
Express Yourself: None, sense and nonsense

Anybody learning to speak a language must sometimes feel as if the entire exercise has been designed to confuse. English is certainly no exception. Having mastered the basic conjugation of ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 30th September 2010
Express Yourself: Over and over again

In any good newspaper or magazine, many stories are competing to appear in a limited amount of space. Unsurprisingly, therefore, editors love stories that can be expressed with clarity and ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 30th June 2010
Express Yourself: Shame on you, Hugh Grant

A few years ago, Hugh Grant starred in a film called Two Weeks Notice. (In a daring career gamble for Grant, it was a romantic comedy.)The movie received mixed reviews ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 2nd June 2010
Express Yourself: Often less is more, sometimes less is just wrong

There are many reasons why people stand in supermarket queues and tut away to themselves. Quite why shops choose to close almost every till at lunchtime, when business people head ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 28th April 2010
Express Yourself: Bad writing literally drives me up the wall

The misuse of language literally makes me tear my hair out in frustration. Firstly, clichés like ‘tearing one’s hair out’ are not colourful and inventive; they are bland and lazy. ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 24th March 2010
Express Yourself: Practice makes perfect (or is it practise…?)

We’ve noticed some confusion in the media lately about the difference between “practice” and “practise”.Conventions in American English differ but with good old-fashioned English English – the original and best! ...

Blogs
Miscellaneous - 24th February 2010
Express Yourself: Me and I (and Terry and June)

To some people’s ears, the sentence: “Terry is going shopping with June and I” sounds perfectly reasonable and correct. To those same people, the statement: “Terry is going shopping with ...