Who doesn’t find a few words stubbornly hard to spell? When I encounter one of my bugbears, I scribble down multiple versions of it, and the correct one usually jumps out at me. For example, is it “accomodate,” “acommodate,” or…
It’s a tiny mark that spawns immense confusion. The beleaguered apostrophe has been in the spotlight since December, following the announcement by John Richards, founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society, that after 18 years of defending the mark, he was…
What’s not to love about a short quiz on some favourite head-scratchers in the English language? Answers are at the end. Award yourself a chocolate truffle for every question you answer correctly. 1. Which is correct? a) I’ve been racking…
As editors, we regularly make style sheets for our clients, documenting the decisions we’ve made about spelling, capitalization, and so on that aren’t covered in the larger style guide we’ve been directed to use. Sometimes clients actually ask us to…
Last night, it being Halloween—or perhaps Hallowe’en—I spent a few minutes thinking about apostrophes again. My blog writing schedule seems to be governed by dates of note that may or may not take apostrophes (see my April 1 posting on…
Although I’ve been a writer and editor for almost 30 years, most of my work has been outside the book publishing world, and I’ve never worked in-house. So when I pitched a children’s book idea to Orca Book Publishers a…
Posting a blog entry today, I am, of course, tempted to write something farcical, outrageous, or dare I say, even foolish, it being April 1. But humour can be a dangerous thing when shared with readers unknown. Some so-called jokes…
If you’ve ever puzzled over why “limb” and “debt” have a silent b, and what’s with the “i before e except after c” dictum when there are so many departures from the so-called rule, here’s the book for you. “For every quirk of spelling, there's…