Author: Helen

It's always an odd feeling when you finish working on a project. You're pretty much the last person to fiddle with it but then it disappears back to the publisher and you never see it again. You can look it up on the publisher's website, you can see it for sale online at various bookstores… Continue reading Surprise Appearance

Abbreviations are used to make long titles or phrases shorter and quicker to say, read and spell. We use abbreviations all the time without actually acknowledging or recognising them for what they are, and often we mistake one form of abbreviation for another. Strictly defined, an abbreviation is a shortened form of a word or… Continue reading Abbreviations

Once we've mastered the basics of writing: capital letters, full stops, finger spaces etc., the comma comes naturally. It is our chance to take a little breath while continuing with the same thought. It is a way of making lots of short choppy sentences into a longer flowing sequence. Some people throw them in too… Continue reading The Oxford comma. Love it or leave it?

We all know the apostrophe, it's that funny squiggle that floats around off the line. Heck, I even have one in my surname – O'Neill. Most people feel very confident using the apostrophe in contractions like can't, wouldn't, I've. But when it comes to the apostrophe and that pesky letter s, we can get a… Continue reading Time + Apostrophe = Confused

English is the most spoken language in the world. However, when it comes to word craft there are some rather important distinctions between the US and UK versions which need to be adhered to when writing or editing and this doesn't even begin to touch on the differences between CMoS and AP. Here are some… Continue reading UK v US English

In my other job as a primary school Learning Assistant, I spend lots of time helping five-year-old children learn how to read and write. Some of this is very straightforward and they can easily figure out the spelling of a word using phonetics. However, there are so many oddities in the English language that we… Continue reading My Little Ones

A friend just sent me a hilarious video of someone trying to get to grips with past tense verbs. It got me thinking about whether we're all extremely smart for learning these rules, or complete idiots for not rising up and demanding that someone fix this insanity. Some past tenses are completely straightforward and follow… Continue reading Why English language, why?

Every piece of writing requires some form of editing but it can daunting trying to work out what level your writing needs. At correctly, we focus on micro editing: the sentence level work that looks at each line and each word. Copyediting is the improvement of your work. Looking at spelling, punctuation, formatting and grammar.… Continue reading What level of assistance does my work need?

I fear I have turned into a self-establishing meme. My family thought they were hilarious, buying me the Grammar Police game for Christmas; however, I'm now constantly disputing some of the game's grammar and appear to have become the subject of mockery and ridicule. Strangely no one wants to play it with me anymore! The… Continue reading Christmas Grammar