“Most people instinctively adjust their language according to the medium. It’s called code-switching and we do it all the time.”

Susan McKerihan spent 20 years as the Plain English editor at PwC, and now has her own business training, coaching and advising businesspeople on how to improve the style and impact of their documents. She was a member of the review panel for Style Manual 6th edition (John Wiley, 2002) and her book on clear […]

No one can avoid grammar. Even if you can’t tell a pronoun from a participle at ten paces, you’re still an amateur grammarian; you employ it, at quite a sophisticated level, every time you speak or text or make a half-decent sentence, even a sentence fragment. You need grammar if you want to make sense, […]

Some errors just keep popping up over and over again. Here are five of the most common: Errors of fact Our ability to get things wrong is considerable. When I was editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest magazine, we had researchers who checked everything. They came up with numerous elementary errors made by top journalists – from […]