A story in the Guardian headlined “Condi’s party surprise cost Britain $10,000″ ends with a quote from a British official: “There were 111 people there - some of them the most influential Americans in the administration. Do the math - it’s good value for money.”
Apart from the evidence that the British official has gone native [...]
David Marsh, editor of the Guardian style guide, can, I have decided after a few minutes thought, be described as an iconoclast — in the nicest possible way. He sets about the overuse of the word icon to describe everything from Jordan to record covers and Vodemort with all the zeal of William Dowsing who [...]
Alistair Burnett, editor of the BBC’s World Tonight, has a good post on the overuse of the word crisis by journalists. On The Editors Blog he writes:
One of the values BBC journalism puts great emphasis on trying to live up to is accuracy. On top of that, language is the most basic of tools for [...]
It often seems that history began some time in the early 1990s. While the internet has given us unprecedented free access to information, it is not good for the facts and opinion that give us the longer perspective.
From the desktop, the 1980s seems like the dark ages. So it is disturbing that libraries are under [...]
Use of the word “prostitute” in coverage of the Ipswich murders has come in for predictable complaints from those who felt that “sex workers” was the more appropriate term. Prostitute is an uncomfortable description to apply to any woman but in context of events in the Suffolk town it had a necessary precision.
Not only does [...]
The BBC is not following NBC in describing the conflict in Iraq as “civil war”. The fighting there, says Jon Williams, the BBC’s word new editor, “defies simple categorisation”.
He writes in the broadcaster’s Editors blog that Harvard professor Monica Toft believes Iraq meets all six of the objective criteria she has identified as being shared [...]
Job titles at the BBC sometimes seem to come from the realms of science fiction. The Controller of Knowledge is clearly a sentient organism controlling the universe from somewhere on the outer spiral of the galaxy.
Not really, it’s Glenwyn Benson.
That is her role in the newly formed BBC Vision division. And what will that entail? [...]
A lifetime in journalism has drummed into me a belief that a consistent style in writing is important. One of those areas is how we name people. The traditional British newspaper approach has been to give people’s full names at first use, eg John Smith, and afterwards Mr Smith. The exceptions are sportspeople, entertainers and [...]
Since restarting Wordblog a month-and-a-half ago I have become increasing aware of the lack of a sub-editor. However long I spend reading copy, I find huge errors of grammar, punctuation and spelling creeping in. Too often, what I intended to say is less clear when read a few days later.
On the whole bloggers are too [...]
Sometimes radio news items are surreal. Did they really say that? you ask. Amit Chaudhuri did. His verse on mishearing the BBC in last Sunday’s Observer was the funniest thing in the paper.
