As a Cambridge graduate, I’m often asked whether I think the so-called Oxford comma at the end of some sentences is strictly necessary. People assume that I must be against it purely out of loyalty to my alma mater. Nothing could be further from the truth; I’m actually a big fan (read to the end to find out why).

There’s a well-known cartoon that often surfaces on social media to illustrate the usefulness of this much-maligned punctuation mark. It shows two sets of party guests and invites us to distinguish between ‘the strippers, JFK, and Stalin’ and ‘the strippers, JFK and Stalin’. Even if you’ve seen it before, why not take a moment to refresh your memory?

Now, this cartoon works not because of the terrible drawing (to my mind, Stalin looks more like Freddie Mercury) but because of the humour caused by the difference between what was intended and what was written.

In the top example, the ‘Oxford comma’ does its work and separates Stalin and JFK from the strippers. They are clearly denoted as three separate entities. In the second example the absence of the final comma ‘pairs’ JFK and Stalin together and seems to place them in what we call grammatical apposition: rather than being separate from the strippers, they ARE the strippers.

Actually, since both scenarios are equally implausible, that extra comma is precisely how you might choose to differentiate the two possible outcomes. But there’s actually nothing wrong with it. In fact in the top example the ‘Oxford comma’ genuinely helps us to understand that there were four guests rather than two.

So while the meme may be famous, it doesn’t really solve the question ‘Is the Oxford comma strictly necessary?’

I was reminded of it when, in today’s Guardian, I came across the following sentence from journalist Robert Mackey reporting on a ‘No Kings’ rally in Portland:

“I just witnessed a remarkable scene further back in the crowd, as protesters carrying handmade signs passed a trio of street performers, dressed as Donald Trump, whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos, JD Vance and Kristi Noem.”

The pleasing ambiguity of that image—the president’s head constructed out of JD Vance and Kristi Noem—could be attributed to the sloppy use of commas. But again it’s not really an ‘Oxford comma’ problem; rather it’s the result of what linguists call ‘rebracketing’.

Allow me to explain by breaking it down:

• The object of the sentence (i.e. what I witnessed) is a trio of street performers. So far, so good.

• There then follows a modifying clause describing those performers: dressed as Donald Trump… JD Vance and Kristi Noem.

• But hidden within, there is also a relative clause describing Trump:
  whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos

Commas (whether Oxfordian or not) are used to separate items in a list. But they can also be used—usually in pairs—as an alternative to parentheses. So let’s try using brackets instead. We now have either

dressed as Donald Trump (whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos), JD Vance and Kristi Noem

or

dressed as Donald Trump (whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos, JD Vance and Kristi Noem)

Which information did the writer intend us to see? Presumably the former, but in the end it doesn’t much matter. Both images are appropriately bizarre and achieve their effect: the street performers and Mr Mackey have done us all a service and given us a laugh.

It’s worth pointing out that even if you add an Oxford comma in that sentence between JD Vance, and Kristi Noem, it still doesn’t solve the essential ambiguity. My advice to Mr Mackey would be to reorganize the whole sentence thus:

“I just witnessed a remarkable scene further back in the crowd, as protesters carrying handmade signs passed a trio of street performers, dressed as JD Vance, Kristi Noem, and Donald Trump (whose head was entirely constructed of Cheetos).

Why I’m in favour

From the above examples, we can see how commas help to avoid ambiguity, and in these cases there is no real cause for dispute.

But critics of the ‘Oxford comma’ complain that all final commas are redundant or useless. I happen not to agree.

Take a simple example:

“The causes of the war were many: territorial disputes, a failing economy, corruption, and poor leadership”

Now, it’s true in this case (as in many such lists) that the final comma before ‘and poor’ can safely be omitted. Have a go. It means the same with or without. But this is not an argument for dropping it.

To my mind the extra comma clarifies that there were four independent causes. To miss out the comma after ‘corruption’ has the effect of merging it with ‘poor leadership’ in a way that may not be true or intentional, so the final comma here acts as an aid to our logical understanding, as well as improving the rhythmical structure of the sentence.

That’s all on this topic for now. If you enjoy these posts, please consider subscribing or sharing.

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My topics today are narrative and rhetoric. These two terms from the world of literary technique—the first denoting the structure of a story and the second the art of persuasive speaking—have both taken on new clothing in the world of political discourse.

Rather than simply referring to the shape of a fictional story, ‘narrative’ is now more often applied to real-world storylines that support an ideological position, often with an element of ‘spin’ or bias.

This definition has its roots in cultural and literary theory from the end of the 20th century, when linguists and social scientists drew distinctions—whether actual or not—between what people mean and what they say.

But it has been popularized by the 21st century’s ‘culture wars’. Here are some examples:

“[He has been] backing far-right figures in America and around the world and posting dubious pro-Trump narratives.”

“This is how the entrenched ‘pro-Israel’ and ‘pro-Palestine’ narratives have been sustained for decades.”

“Democrats need to start controlling the narrative”

In the sense that these political narratives have a specific aim and direction of travel, they resemble stories, of course, so the borrowed definition has not strayed too far from its original sense.

With ‘rhetoric’, alas, it’s an entirely different story.

This word (from which we also get ‘oratory’) was until very recently applied to the sophisticated art of shaping language into a persuasive argument, through the use of certain ‘rhetorical devices’ —for example the tricolon, in which a word is repeated three or more times for effect:

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”

Perhaps the most famous rhetorical device is the rhetorical question, which always expects, but does not require, the answer ‘No’:

“Can there be anyone untouched by the slow erosion of truth in our time?”

By the 2020s, however, such artful tricks were seen as elitist, the product of a classical education. It became popular to think of such academic use of language as ‘mere’ or ‘empty rhetoric’, i.e. ‘hot air’ or bombast: language that—far from persuading its audience, should be treated with suspicion:

“Critics say that the government’s rhetoric about inclusion hasn’t been matched by its policies”

As a result, ‘rhetoric’ has been even further devalued. It is now applied to any language used by anyone, no longer artfully fashioned but simply a yobbish shouting match, with insults being hurled left and right.

Here are some examples:

“UK charities say toxic immigration rhetoric leading to threats against staff”

“Could the Tories be seeking to benefit from the same anti-establishment rhetoric that Reform has, now that they’re no longer in power?”

In the first example above, what ‘rhetoric’ actually means is simply ‘insulting or abusive language’.

As a student of literature, I am sorry that both ‘rhetoric’ and ‘narrative’ have been devalued in this way. It seems to me that if politicians were to strive to order their language and their thoughts in a more reflective way, and not blurt out the first inanity that enters their flustered heads on morning television, we might trust them more.

It may well be that Blair’s famous tricolon ‘Education, education, education’ is what is really missing.

My poetry bookshelves are particularly rich in the H department. Here reside the collected works of four great twentieth-century poets, one Irish (Seamus Heaney) and three associated with the midlands and north of England: Geoffrey Hill, born in Bromsgrove, who worked for many years at the University of Leeds before moving to Cambridge, where I was fortunate enough to be taught by him. Ted Hughes, from Yorkshire, whose strong, muscular verse made the natural world come powerfully alive—and who was appointed Poet Laureate on the death of John Betjeman. And Tony Harrison, also from Leeds, whose powerful poems and verse dramas combined a classical education with an uncompromising fealty to his Northern roots.

Of the four, Harrison was the most overtly political; his writing focused on his own sense of guilt at having left behind his working-class roots to go to university. Here’s his extended sonnet ‘Book Ends’, in which he recalls an awkward visit to his recently-widowed father:

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.

Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed.
We never could talk much, and now don’t try.

You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say,
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare...

The ‘scholar’ me, you, worn out on poor pay,
only our silence made us seem a pair.

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.

A night you need my company to pass
and she not here to tell us we’re alike!

Your life’s all shattered into smithereens.

Back in our silences and sullen looks,
for all the Scotch we drink, what’s still between ‘s
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.

(Book Ends I, 1978)

The ingredients of that poem—the apple pie, the remembered grate of the old coal fire, and its modern gas replacement—perfectly capture the front room of the small terraced house in Holbeck where Harrison grew up. But the apostrophized ‘scholar’ picks up the complexity of his own and his father’s feelings about Harrison’s departure from his working-class origins, as does the final line—a conscious echo of Hamlet’s ‘words, words, words’ (which the elderly Polonius can never understand).

Here’s a less well known poem on the same theme. By the way, ‘snap’ is a northern dialect word for a packed lunch, in this case made up of last night’s ‘tea’ (evening meal):

Ah, the proved advantages of scholarship!
Whereas his dad took cold tea for his snap,
he slaves at nuances, knows at just one sip
Château Lafite from Château Neuf du Pape.

(Social Mobility, 1975)

The form of the poem—the witty epigram—is a bit of fun for a poet at that time immersing himself in 4th-century Greek verse. But the content absolutely betrays the feeling of the scholar’s fraudulence, of superficiality, of what we might call ‘impostor syndrome’. And the anglo-saxon monosyllables of his dad’s honest and meagre fare perfectly contrast the accented gallicisms of the wine labels.

Harrison’s greatest achievement is the long-form elegy ‘V’ - one of several poems inspired by Thomas Gray’s Elegy in a Country Churchyard of 1750. In Harrison’s poem, ‘V’ alludes to what he calls ‘all the versuses of life’

…from LEEDS v. DERBY, Black/White
and (as I’ve known to my cost) man v. wife,
Communist v. Fascist, Left v. Right,

class v. class as bitter as before,
the unending violence of US and THEM,
personified in 1984
by Coal Board MacGregor and the NUM”

The poem includes an extended dialogue between Harrison and a skinhead who spends his fruitless days descrating the gravestones on Holbeck Hill, including that of Harrison’s own parents and grandparents—working-class folk who produced beer, meat and baked goods for the local community.

In repeating the lad’s obscene graffiti, Harrison’s poem became instantly recognizable and hugely controversial for its use of profanities. Calls from a number of Conservative MPs to suspend its 1987 television broadcast only guaranteed it a substantial audience. You can still find the poem in its original published form here in the London Review of Books. It remains required reading for anyone investigating the state of Thatcher’s Britain during the miners’ strike.

Tony Harrison died today. In ‘V’ he muses that one day he will come to lie in that same family grave. He jokingly remarks that as a poet he won’t be short of company: after all, an organ-builder called Wordsworth and a leather-tanner called Byron lie in adjacent plots. But despite his years of scholarship, his volumes of poetry and dozens of plays for the National Theatre, it is with his working-class forebears that he most associates:

If, having come this far, somebody reads
these verses, and he/she wants to understand,
face this grave on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds,
and read the chiselled epitaph I’ve planned:

Beneath your feet’s a poet, then a pit.
Poetry supporter, if you’re here to find
how poems can grow from (beat you to it!) SHIT
find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind.

(‘V’, 1985)

Recently I visited the island of Kephalonia (or, if you prefer, Cephallenia, Cephallonia, Kefallinia, Kefallonia, Kefalonia, or Kephallenia).

I already knew that during the days of the British ‘protectorate’ (from 1815 to 1864) the island was spelt ‘Cephallonia’; and that indeed remains the prevalent British English spelling, as readers of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin will know. However, I was flying from the Czech Republic, where spellings with ‘K’ align more neatly and naturally with both the Modern Greek and Czech alphabets, so the luggage tag said ‘Kefalonia’.

But what really confused matters was the departures board, where the destination appeared as neither Cephalonia nor Kefalonia, but ‘Kefalinia’. It turns out that the ending ‘-inia’ rather than ‘-onia’ is still fairly commonplace among travel agents, airlines and travel review sites.

Tantalisingly, Kephallinia is by far the most ancient spelling, its roots extending way back to Homer’s description of the island’s people as ‘the Kephallenes’. There is even a suggestion that Kephallinia was the true Ithaca, home of Odysseus, rather than the neighbouring island we know as Ithaca today.

The Cephalonia/Kephallinia debate is not unusual. Placenames are particularly susceptible to multiple transliterations and translations. Czech ‘Londýn’ reminds us that London was once ‘Londinium’. Another favourite is the Italian word for Munich - ‘Monaco di Bavaria’. Both Munich and Monaco derive from the word for ‘monk’. But the other Monaco (as in Monte Carlo) is originally from the Greek ‘mono oikos’, meaning a single or unique settlement.

Such variations frequently happen when words are rendered in other languages. But sometimes a single language offers multiple spellings of its own, as a result of regional dialects, or even - as we are about to see - because of political changes.

As a schoolboy, I was lucky enough to have the option of studying Ancient Greek for A level. Its oddly complex grammar included three voices: active, passive and the mysterious and rarely used ‘middle’; moods such as the ‘optative’, for expressing hope; and quirky names for tenses like 'aorist’ (where most people would be content with just ‘past’).

Studying ancient texts at the age of 15 made me acutely aware of the passage of time, the impact of history, the usefulness of rhetoric, and the fascination of etymology, since many words in English traced their origins to Greek and Latin.

When I left school I spent a year in Athens, putting my language skills to the test. Of course a great deal had changed in 2,500 years. The grammar had been massively simplified, as had the rhetoric. And although the written alphabet remained unchanged, the sounds I had been taught had undergone a certain ‘softening’. The letter ‘beta’ (or B) was now pronounced ‘veeta’, and ‘delta’ (D) had become ‘thelta’. Vowel combinations - ‘ei’, ‘oi’ and ‘ui’, as well as the letter ‘eta’ (E) - were now all pronounced identically as ‘ee’.

But strangest of all, two related but completely distinct versions of modern Greek had emerged: dimotiki, the vernacular speech of the everyday citizen, and katharevousa, an artificially-constructed bastard child of ancient Greek which seemed to be used only by newspapers and for communications by the Greek Orthodox church.

Katharevousa was also a political tool. Between 1967 and 1974, Greece had been ruled by a repressive right-wing military junta. Among the changes they introduced was a ban on dimotiki and the forced adoption of the neoclassical katharevousa as the official state language. By the way, katharevousa - appropriately for a fascist-leaning government - means ‘purified language’ (think ‘catharsis’).

The colonels were doing what all fascists do: trying to call back a golden age when things were - according to their simplified view of history - orderly and neat. But the right-wing junta were anything but pure, and after their overthrow, dimotiki was reinstated as the state language.

At the time I lived there in 1981, the two ‘languages’, the natural demotic and the official ‘cleaned-up’ version, operated in tandem. The two could be seen side-by side on road signs (which would point, for example, to ‘Amaroussi’ but also to ‘Amaroussion’) and on coins, the more newly-minted of which gave the amount in ‘drachmes’, while the slightly older ones referred to ‘drachmai’ (see picture above).

That same year, PASOK, Papandreou’s socialist party, swept to power with 48% of the vote - becoming the first socialist government since the 1920s. Their campaign was buoyed by a populist left-wing newspaper called Ethnos (‘The People’). With a design modelled (ironically) on the Daily Mail, it was Greece’s first tabloid newspaper, and one of the first to be printed in demotiki.

I was reminded of all this again when driving around Kephalonia on my way to the memorial to the Italian soldiers murdered by the Nazis twenty-five years before the colonels came to power. I passed a demotiki sign to Argostoli, the main town of the island. I checked on the tourist map provided by the car hire company and could see only the conservative katharevousa placename, ‘Argostolion’. Even today, politics affects the everyday lives of ordinary Greeks.

Students of linguistics are familiar with the ‘Great Vowel Shift’, the name we give to the alteration of vowel sounds over long periods of time. It is the reason why a Scot will say ‘hoos’ and an Englishman ‘house’, for example. Such modifications in language are not confined to vowels, either. In the United States, pronouncing the ‘r’ in ‘car’ or ‘bird’ was considered socially inferior until after the Civil War, when the centres of political power shifted away from the (British-influenced) east coast. Gradually, the ‘rhotic’ forms of the word gained prestige, and now it is unusual to hear an American say ‘cah’ (unless they are putting on an English accent).

Such phonetic shifts can be explained in terms of social mobility and class aspiration, but these effects are well researched elsewhere. What concerns me in this short piece is something slightly different.

When a word’s sound changes, it can collide with a pre-existing word of the same sound, and force people or communities to alter that word too, in order to distinguish between meanings. In this way, a domino effect (or push-chain) is set up whereby multiple items in a language’s vocabulary take on new sounds.

For example, in mediaeval times the word mate was pronounced ‘maht’. But when, owing to various changes, it began to be pronounced ‘meht’, it clashed with the then sound of the word for the flesh of an animal. So that word (meat) took on the pronunciation ‘meet’, which it still has today.

Talking of meat brings me neatly to the real substance of my argument. To find out more, please consider subscribing, and read on…

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I first heard Tom some time in the summer of 1977, the year of Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee, in the classroom of a flamboyant and highly progressive English teacher who delighted in knocking the establishment. On his classroom walls, apart from the usual posters of literary greats, was a cover from the satirical paper Private Eye, with the headline ‘Windsor Woman in Massive Pools Win’. Below was a photograph of the Queen, with a speech bubble reading “It will not change my way of life”.

This was probably my introduction to satire; the second was when Dr Palmer pressed ‘play’ on the Tom Lehrer casette, and within seconds we were in hysterics. We didn’t know why, and I’m not sure how many catholics were in our class, but who cared. Those were less litigious days, and besides, ‘The Vatican Rag’—satirizing the recent modernization of certain aspects of the church’s ritual—was such a brilliant song:

‘Get in line in that processional
Step into that small confessional;
There the guy that’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original

If it is, try playin’ it safer
Drink the wine and chew the wafer;
Two, four, six, eight
Time to transubstantiate!’

From the get-go, inventive multisyllabic rhymes like ‘religion’ll / original’ thrilled me. And there were other rhymes too, each one comically perfect. Like this one from ‘Smut’, a song mocking the very British preoccupation with sex (and alluding to the famous 1960 court-case in which Penguin Books were found not guilty of publishing obscenity):

‘Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: re-reading Lady Chatterley.’

From the introduction to the same song comes this broken rhyme (‘broken’ not just because the last word is split in two, but because in neglecting the ‘rules’ it breaks our expectations). And of course it only really works because of Lehrer’s comic delivery:

‘Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut
If it's uncut
And unsubt-tle.’

It was always the Lyrics

He was a fantastic parodist. No genre of popular music from any century was free from the prick of his pastiche: show tunes, the Viennese waltz, Scott Joplin’s ragtime, Gilbert and Sullivan, Irish ballads, you name it; and his skilful renditions provided much of the humour. But for me, it was always the lyrics.

I later learnt that throughout the sixties Lehrer had appeared regularly on the British satirical TV show ‘That Was The Week That Was (or TW3 as it was affectionately known), but we didn’t have TV at home, so I caught up with all this much later.

In particular, the relevance of his many songs about nuclear destruction had cooled off a bit by the time I heard them (I was born a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis).

But they remain some of the most brilliant pieces of political writing in the songbook. The one which I’ve chosen as the title of this encomium is perhaps the greatest of them all, and replete with those broken and polysyllabic rhymes that both lengthen and lighten the material:

‘When you attend a funeral,
It is sad to think that sooner or l-
ater those you love will do the same for you.

And you may have thought it tragic,
Not to mention other adjec-
tives, to think of all the weeping they will do
But don’t you worry:

No more ashes, no more sackcloth,
And an armband made of black cloth
Will some day never more adorn a sleeve:
For if the bomb that drops on you
Gets your friends and neighbors too,
There'll be nobody left behind to grieve.’

The terrifying idea of what Lehrer calls ‘universal bereavement’ is set against an upbeat, patriotic tune that ends with these mock-celebratory lines.

‘When the air becomes uranious,
We will all go simultaneous.
Yes, we all will go together
When we all go together,
Yes. we all will go together when we go.’

Last words

My last words are reserved specifically for Lehrer’s last words: his ability to deliver some of the best punchlines you will ever hear. There are many examples I could give, but they only really work in the context of the preamble, so here is most of ‘So Long, Mom’

‘Little Johnny Jones he was a U.S. pilot,
And no shrinking violet was he!
He was mighty proud when World War Three was declared.
He wasn't scared, no siree!

And this is what he said on
His way to Armageddon:

So long, Mom, I'm off to drop the bomb,
So don't wait up for me.
But though I may roam, I'll come back to my home,
Although it may be
A pile of debris.

Remember, Mommy,
I'm off to get a Commie,
So send me a salami,
And try to smile somehow.
I'll look for you when the war is over …
An hour and a half from now.

That Viennese Waltz I mentioned earlier did Tom Lehrer great service when he wrote about European matters, especially the song ‘Alma’ in which he celebrates the life and death of Alma Mahler-Werfel, whose obituary he calls ‘the juiciest, spiciest, [and] raciest’ he had ever read. He also put it to good use in another of his Cold War specials, on the theme of Nazi-turned-NASA rocket scientist Wehrner von Braun, and it is with this prophetic punchline that I leave you today:

‘You too may be a big hero
Once you've learned to count backwards to zero
"In German, oder Englisch, I know how to count down—
Und I'm learning Chinese…" says Wernher von Braun.’

One of my first tests of the power of ChatGPT, back in late 2022, was to ask it to write a poem in the style of Alexander Pope. I chose the 18th century satirist for one particular reason: his mastery of ‘mock-heroic’ verse, in which he reimagined London life in the style of the classical poets Vergil and Homer.

Typical of the mock-epic style is the precise five-beat line (the iambic pentameter), and the conceit that the poem is addressed as a letter (or ‘epistle’). Many of Pope’s notable poems of the 1730s were written in this way to friends, acquaintances and wealthy patrons.

So I asked ChatGPT to write an Epistle in the manner of Pope, as if he were addressing that great pioneer of computing, Alan Turing. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say, the resulting train of thought was … well, you will see. This was the first attempt:

“To Dr. Turing, master of the code,
Whose mind doth solve what none forebode,
Whose genius doth transcend the age,
And pave the way for progress' stage.

With humble pen, I write to thee,
In admiration and in plea,
To offer praise where praise is due,
And shed some light on what you knew.”

Not bad, but it didn’t completely pass the test. Phrases such as ‘what none forebode’, or ‘in admiration and in plea’ seemed forced, as if they had been chosen simply for the rhyme. And of course, these were not pentameters - they only had four beats to a line, rather than five, an error that I challenged at the time:

Me: Would you like to have another go at the first two lines of the poem?

ChatGPT: Sure, I would love to give it another try. Here's my revised attempt at the first two lines of the poem in iambic pentameter:

“To Doctor Turing, master of the code,
Whose mind unlocks what none have e'er forebode.”

Well, that was something of an immediate improvement, although when I asked it to repeat the exercise a day or two later, it was back to four beats in the bar - old habits die hard.

Roll on 2025. It’s been a mere thirty months since I first ran my experiment, and I asked ChatGPT, now much more book-learned, to repeat the exercise. Here’s the astonishing result, which is worth quoting in full. Why not subscribe, to read the rest?

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These are still early days for post-Turing-test interactions, but actually computers have been simulating human writing for many decades. Twenty or more years ago they would have given human-like responses by pulling appropriate answers from some vast compendium of actual writing.

About ten years ago, systems began constructing responses algorithmically, using hand-crafted rules or statistical models that combined words or phrases according to syntactic templates, without true understanding of language or context.

And now? Now they generate text dynamically using large language models that predict the most likely next word based on context, rather than following fixed rules. Thanks to the immense processing power of modern machines, even my humble laptop can respond uniquely and seemingly effortlessly to complex requests. There’s little doubt that machines have now come remarkably close to mastering natural language dialogue.

All of which has set the alarm-bells ringing, particularly in academe. In pre-AI days, the likelihood was that derived answers would find a match somewhere on the internet, and a huge educational side-business of plagiarism checkers was born. The market leader, ‘Turnitin’, became part-and-parcel of the university experience for lecturers and students alike from the mid-2000s to the late 2010s. But now, they’ve capitulated. Their new software is designed to proactively help those students who do use AI to do so better and more ethically. Or something like that.

On the other hand, detectors such as GPTZero, developed by Princeton student Edward Tian in 2023, have also failed the litmus test because of their tendency (20% of the time, in the case of GPTZero) to assume that original, well-formed and articulate human text has been produced using AI.

A business professor of my acquaintance here in Prague set his students writing on the topic of the recent decline in Czech GDP. 90% of the answers that came back confidently and elegantly delineated the various factors that might have led to such an economic downturn. Just 10% of them pointed out that in fact GDP has grown, not declined, in this period. A (deliberately) inaccurate prompt had led their AI assistants down the wrong research path.

So is there a foolproof way of testing for AI-generated answers? Well, it’s tough. But my proofreading experience has given me one potential pinprick test that works for me nearly all the time. Want to know what it is? You’ll have to subscribe to find out!

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I’ve been reading a book about graphic design whose author takes inspiration from his experience of Japanese culture. His creative approach centres on a deep understanding of space and simplicity, reduction rather than complication. Whether it’s the spacing between text and image, or the choice of colour, or the importance of focusing on a single idea, there are countless examples to be found in the paintings, gardens and fabrics of Japan.

Optimizing content takes a similar approach. Where there is a choice between different ways of sending a message, it’s frequently the simpler one that is the most effective.

English is blessed with a huge vocabulary drawn from multiple languages. We can use words derived from Latin: ‘The significance of education is universal’; or we can say something pretty much the same in Anglo-Saxon: ‘School means everything’. They’re not identical, true, and they may have different uses depending on your audience.

For instance, in a brochure or website for a motor oil company we might find ‘Lubrication is a vital component, ensuring smooth mechanical transmission and hence greater fuel efficiency’. But in the same company’s marketing, we might find ‘Our grease keeps your business moving’. Same idea, fewer words.

This is not to deny that complexity doesn’t exist. It’s more that there is a time and a place for both kinds of expression. Knowing which to choose demands an understanding of message, context and audience. And this art, of writing and editing for the web, is just as important as getting the graphic design right.

In the social-media-driven world of today, accuracy is more important than ever. It’s also, it seems, increasingly hard to find. A huge amount of what we read these days, on- or off-line, seems to be either deliberately or accidentally miswritten.

And while readers are prepared to ‘call out’ photographic images that have been tinkered or tampered with – in the process now universally known as ‘photoshopping’ – it’s harder to tell when it comes to the written word.

Take this story, for example, which appeared recently on Facebook:

It occurred to Pooh and Piglet that they hadn’t heard from Eeyore for several days, so they put on their hats and coats and trotted across the Hundred Acre Wood to Eeyore’s stick house. Inside the house was Eeyore.

“Hello Eeyore,” said Pooh.

“Hello Pooh. Hello Piglet,” said Eeyore, in a Glum Sounding Voice.

“We just thought we’d check in on you,” said Piglet, “because we hadn’t heard from you, and so we wanted to know if you were okay.”

Eeyore was silent for a moment. “Am I okay?” he asked, eventually. “Well, I don’t know, to be honest. Are any of us really okay? That’s what I ask myself. All I can tell you, Pooh and Piglet, is that right now I feel really rather Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. Which is why I haven’t bothered you. Because you wouldn’t want to waste your time hanging out with someone who is Sad, and Alone, and Not Much Fun To Be Around At All, would you now.”

Pooh looked at Piglet, and Piglet looked at Pooh, and they both sat down, one on either side of Eeyore in his stick house.

Eeyore looked at them in surprise. “What are you doing?”

“We’re sitting here with you,” said Pooh, “because we are your friends. And true friends don’t care if someone is feeling Sad, or Alone, or Not Much Fun To Be Around At All. True friends are there for you anyway. And so here we are.”

“Oh,” said Eeyore. “Oh.” And the three of them sat there in silence, and while Pooh and Piglet said nothing at all; somehow, almost imperceptibly, Eeyore started to feel a very tiny little bit better.

Because Pooh and Piglet were There. No more; no less.

Author – AA Milne
Illustration – EH Shepard

Does this story look familiar to you? It certainly did to many readers who left grateful comments on the Facebook page in question, thanking whoever posted it for ‘reminding’ them of this episode, how they enjoyed it as children, and how they still read the book to their own families.

And why not? After all, the post tells us that the author is A.A. Milne, and the accompanying illustration implies that the story is indeed from his 1928 book The House at Pooh Corner. It’s set in Hundred Acre Wood; words like ‘trotted’ and ‘glum’ sound appropriate for Piglet and Eeyore; and the mock-title ‘Not Much Fun To Be Around At All’ is capitalized in the same way as the famous ‘Bear of Very Little Brain’. To cap it all, there’s a Pooh-like simplicity to the story, best summed up in the final line: ‘Because Pooh and Piglet were There.’

But here truth and reality part company.

Would A.A. Milne, writing in 1928, really have used ‘okay’ so freely? Would he have used the expression ‘We thought we’d check in on you’? Or ‘hanging out with someone who is sad’? Or ‘True friends are there for you’? Just a brief examination of the vocabulary of the piece is enough to make us realize that this is in fact an early 21st-century parody of A.A. Milne.

Which is not to say it is bad, or wrong. In fact as parody it’s highly successful. Good pastiches like this preserve enough of the original to make us laugh out loud precisely at what is unlikely and unexpected. The first appearance of the above passage was on the Facebook site of its true author, the energetic blogger Kathryn Wallace, whose parodic versions of Winnie the Pooh are the perfect vehicle for articulating the hassled life of a busy mum. Here’s another of hers:

“I just don’t understand, Piglet,” said Pooh.

“What’s that, old pal?”

“Well, why do we have to have Mondays? They’re just so… unnecessary.”

Piglet mused on the question for a moment, his tiny ears wobbling up and down with concentration as he thought.

“Well,” he said, after some consideration. “I suppose, that if we didn’t have Mondays…well, Fridays wouldn’t be so ruddy marvellous, would they?”

“Oh Piglet,” said Pooh. “You really are the Best Pig of Greatest Brain that I have ever met. Now, can we go and celebrate the marvellousness of Fridays with gin and takeaway?”

“Too bloody right we can,” said Piglet. “Too bloody right.”

So, if parody isn’t wrong, what’s the problem? Well, in the interest of copyright, research, honesty and simple transparency, it’s the attribution. When Kathryn’s story was copied (as it has now been hundreds of times) to social media feeds, somewhere along the way picked up the tag ‘Author – AA Milne / Illustration – EH Shepard’.

And that is the problem. If the passage is not by A.A. Milne, it should not claim to be. Anything other than the original is just Fake Poohs. Oh, and by the way, the illustration I’ve used above is also a fake. It’s actually a self-confessed forgery of a drawing by E.H. Shepard, as explained by its copyist, Anne Belov.

Business presentations have come a long way from the dry recitation of quarterly results, the predictable analysis of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, and the proposed strategic plan 'going forward'.

These days it's pretty much de rigeur to liven up your presentation with a slide containing an inspirational quotation from Gandhi, Churchill, Einstein, or some other admirable historical figure. The further they are removed from the world of business the better - it makes them sound more authentic.

But in the absence of one of these global gurus, many coaches and public speakers are happy to plump for any canny definition from a contemporary business leader or (preferably) 'influencer'. Take this for example: "Business has two — and only two — basic functions: marketing and innovation."

Set against a landscape of rolling hills, this snappy blue-sky quotation is the perfect opener, instantly clearing away the clutter and causing us to look at the world of business afresh, through the eyes of .... who? Now who did say that? Seth Godin? Bill Gates? Donald Trump? Alan Sugar?

Try again. According to the internet, these are the sententious words of none other than Milan Kundera, the Czech-born, Paris-dwelling author of the darkly ironic The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke.

Now to anyone who has read him, the attribution to Kundera really seems somewhat unlikely. After all, this author, whose works combine political satire and philosophical musings on humanity and fate, is not known for his pronouncements on the business world. Yet here they are, slide after slide (I have shown only two on this page), showing the brooding Kundera now re-cast as business guru, the rebellious author as social media influencer.

So widespread is the error that even the hallowed Economist has included the 'Milan Kundera' line in its 2012 Book of Business Quotations. In fact, it may well be its inclusion in that weighty tome that has convinced many internet users that the quotation must be authentic.

But if not Kundera, who exactly did come out with this (after all fairly platitudinous) bit of business-speak? Well, it will hardly surprise many readers from the world of corporate management to learn that the actual author was Peter Drucker, the highly prolific 'father of management thinking'. In Drucker's 1954 book The Practice of Management, we find the following: "Any business enterprise has two — and only two — basic functions: marketing and innovation." Bingo.

Yet a number of websites — including one called Marketing Insider Group — still defend the attribution to Kundera, with sentences like these:

(Knowledge drop: Most people attribute the above quote to Peter Drucker who clearly borrowed from the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being when he said: “Because it is its purpose to create a customer, any business enterprise has two – and only these two – basic functions: marketing and innovation.” But Milan said it first.)

What? When he was only 15 years old?

Now my real problem with all this is that if the opening slide of the presentation gets the quote wrong, or happily goes ahead and attributes it to the wrong person (and the example of Milan Kundera is — believe me — just the tip of the iceberg), then why on earth should we trust the slides that come next?

Why might the graphs showing growth over the last quarter not also be riddled with mistakes, accidental or otherwise? Why might the strategic plan not be copied from another company's website? (after all, plagiarism is not unknown, even in the world of business). And why might not some of those great corporate strengths actually be weaknesses?

I imagine some readers find my objection to those using 'fake news' somewhat flippant. Just ask then, was the chart showing diesel emissions to Volkswagen shareholders accurate? Do documents listing workplace policies on pay and conditions always resemble the truth? Or are they, too, examples of 'sliding truths'?

So much of what we see at first sight in a presentation is superficial, and sadly is too easily accepted by the audience. It is our job to question it. That’s hard, but it has to be done. Or, as Milan Kundera actually noted: ‘On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.’

The word ‘critic’ originally denoted someone whose job was to judge between a good or bad action, a defendant’s guilt or innocence, or the positive or negative outcome of a disease - fine distinctions known as ‘crisis’ points. The outcome either way was deemed to be ‘critical’. The essential point was that the critic was impartial: the decision could go either way.

But by the time this Greek word entered the English language (like so many other words, it first appeared in the works of Shakespeare, in 1598), ‘critic’ had already taken on the negative connotation it has today. Appropriately enough, the critics who attracted the greatest opprobrium were those in the theatre. Their reviews could make or break a reputation, but more frequently the latter.

Amid all this negativity, a more neutral expression was needed so around a century later, the French ‘critique’ was adopted into English - originally meaning the work of the critic – be it an essay, a review, or a printed article.

By 1751, ‘critique’ was being used as a verb, but one which was blissfully free of the reputation of ‘criticize’. So now a person could write a critique, without necessarily being critical in a negative sense. Equally, one could ‘critique’ a performance, or a piece of writing, again without necessarily condemning it to the limbo of one-star reviews.

But language is a living thing. Words, and their meanings, are constantly shifting under the pressure of popular usage. Roll on to 2021, and we have a problem.

Mainly as a result of the popularity of TV talent shows presided over by experts from the music industry, ‘critique’ itself has now been infected with the same sense of disparagement as ‘criticize’. So we have ended up with two verbs, ‘criticize‘ and ‘critique’, used pretty much interchangeably, and both of them negative in tone. “I don’t mean to critique you,” says the 21st-century critic, “but that was terrible.” Actually, critiquing is their job – but that’s not what they mean.

In the story of language, it’s quite normal for speakers to adopt new expressions when a word has become so ambiguous that it requires some special distinction to be made. And it’s true that over time, such distinctions can in turn be eroded. Perhaps ‘critique’ is too close to ‘critic’ to imply something different or opposite. In which case we need to start all over again. Which word would you recommend as the new ‘critique’?

Because everyone uses language differently, style guides exist to provide some degree of consistency. They are like rule-books, providing a ‘correct’ approach to punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, disputed spellings and so on. They also cover areas such as layout of dates and numbers, use of abbreviations, capitalization, and how to refer to cited articles, essays and publications.

Of course, it would be wonderful if there were one compendium to cover all possible eventualities. But the fact is that different professions require particular rules and ways of laying out information.

Journalists, for example, may use ‘AP’ style, and academics ‘Chicago’ or ‘MLA’ style, whereas lawyers may refer either to the ‘Bluebook’ or else ‘ALWD’ style. (Incidentally, ‘Harvard style’ – which actually has no official connection with Harvard University – is technically a system for referencing cited works, rather than a complete style guide.)

To complicate matters still further, individual institutions and publications, for example The Guardian, The Washington Post or the BBC, have their own ‘house styles’, which may change over time.

For instance, in the case of the oft-disputed spelling of verbs in ‘-ize’, The Times newspaper has plumped for ‘-ise’ – but only since 1992. And in what they see as a reflection of today’s less hierarchical society, editors at The Guardian have drastically reduced the use of capital letters. Among their controversial recommendations are ‘St Nicolas church’, ‘Great Ormond Street children’s hospital’ and ‘Ripon grammar school’.

English Wanted recommends one of three usage and style guides for general use: New Hart’s Rules (formerly The Oxford Guide to Style), the MLA Manual of Style, and the MHRA Style Guide.

The last of these, published by the Modern Humanities Research Association, is particularly good for those writers who are new to style guides. It’s compact, up-to-date, and best of all completely free online at this link. It’s also the style guide which I use at English Wanted. Take a look, and see if your own writing comes close to their rules and recommendations!

Verbal ambiguities are frequently the cause of laughter, sometimes at inappropriate moments.

During the state funeral of the 41st President of the United States, onlookers were touched by the loyalty of George Bush’s dog, who stayed in close proximity to his master to the very end. Even so, they were surprised and disturbed to read the following report from the next day’s Sydney Morning Herald:

‘After accompanying the statesman and World War II veteran in the final months of his life, Sully, the late president’s service dog, lay before the casket holding what remained of him.’

The unintentional humour of this sentence reminded me of this other example from my schooldays: ‘Launching the ship with impressive ceremony, the Admiral’s daughter smashed a bottle of champagne over her stern as she slid gracefully down the slipway.’

In both cases, there is what might be called ‘subject-object’ confusion. In the latter example, ‘she’ could refer either to the Admiral’s daughter or to the ship (ships are frequently referred to as feminine objects). In the former, it’s not clear whether the object (the casket) is doing the ‘holding’ or the subject (Sully the dog).

To get an unambiguous sentence, we must separate the subject and object.

In the case of the story of the late president, that is easily done by changing the participle form of the verb (‘holding’) into a relative clause starting with ‘that’ or ‘which’. This allows the object to have its own verb that is clearly not connected to Sully the dog:

‘After accompanying the statesman and World War II veteran in the final months of his life, Sully, the late president’s service dog, lay before the casket that held what remained of him.’

So we can change the wording to avoid embarrassment, but the question is whether we really want to. After all, it’s sometimes important to be able to laugh in the face of grief.

Some of the most confusing aspects of English style have nothing to do with sentences, words, or even letters, but numbers; for instance, the thorny question of when it is better to use digits (‘1…9’), and when to use their written equivalents (‘one…nine’).

Even among experts, there is surprisingly little agreement on this particular conundrum, and it’s a question I’ll be addressing in greater detail another time. Today, however, we are concerned with dates.

First (or should that be 1st?) comes the question of whether dates should be written using cardinal (‘2’,‘3’) or ordinal (‘2nd’, ‘3rd’) numbers. There is no single answer here: both are valid in the grammar book. But to avoid any confusion, I always suggest using only cardinals. So, rather than ‘14th of July’ or ‘14th July’, we prefer – for the sake of clarity – ‘14 July’.

Example:
‘He arrived in Paris on 14 July, just in time for the fireworks.’

In spoken English we would naturally expand this written form to ‘the fourteenth of July’ although it’s not uncommon in American English to hear ‘July fourteen’.

‘Each’ or ‘every’ may also replace the definite article: ‘The French celebrate their independence every 14 July (‘every fourteenth of July’).

Secondly, there’s the question of word order. Why not ‘July 14’ rather than ‘14 July’? Again, usage is broad. While there is nothing incorrect in the date following the month, a leading date can be quite useful in avoiding confusion, because it lends itself to a format in which digits and letters can be neatly alternated, thus: ‘Thursday 14 July 2016’ (as opposed to ‘Thursday July 14 2016’, where all the digits clump together). With this convention, it is also unnecessary to insert any commas.

Finally, abbreviated dates. British English leads with the date, followed by the month, then the year. This way, the shortest unit of time comes first, then the longer, then the longest. 14-06-16, or 14/6/16. The logic is unassailable.

By contrast, the American system of month-date-year is, frankly, weird; and it leads to many errors by clerks and copywriters the world over. There are many things to be commended in American stylistic convention, but this is not one of them. It is high time the system was abandoned.

They say hairdressing will be one of the last jobs to bow to AI. Well, one form of barbering has already fallen. I’m referring, of course, to the sadly lost art of summary - or for those who prefer French, précis.

Without doubt, the ability to summarize is one of the most critical skills in the editor's toolbox. Writing can be much too wordy and verbose, sentences too lengthy, and paragraphs — frequently stuffed with subordinate clauses and parentheses — just too complex to allow the reader to understand the meaning with any immediacy. To be able to capture what is being communicated in a way that preserves its essential meaning while reducing the word-count is an invaluable asset, and one that should be applied more regularly than it is: the job of a good editor is to remove what is surplus to requirements while keeping what is important.'

Whoa — hang on a moment! That second paragraph is a perfect example of some prose that could really do with a haircut. It's composed of just three sentences, but contains over a hundred words — far more than necessary.

A quick analysis shows that the paragraph has just two main points: it explains what summarizing is for, and expresses the opinion that it is something every good editor should be able to do. Yet the piece of writing as a whole is full of repeated and redundant phrases. For example, 'wordy', 'verbose' and 'lengthy' all mean pretty much the same thing. It should be possible to combine all these words into one.

That long second sentence suffers from exactly the mistakes it describes: too many clauses bunched together. It can be considerably simplified by cutting it down to a single clause with one main verb: 'Writing is often too complex for readers to understand at first sight'.

In the final sentence, we read that good editing 'preserves essential meaning while reducing the word-count', and at the same time that an editor should 'remove what is surplus to requirements while keeping what is important'. This is saying the same thing in two different ways. One of these sentences must go.



Now of course, AI has taken over this kind of harmless drudgery. But if you want to keep your brain in trim, as well as your prose, you’ll thank me for this ‘handwritten’ introduction to the old way.

Here are my own summaries. I have set myself targets, respectively, of 50 words, 30 words and 10 words.

50-word target:
'The ability to summarize is a critical skill for editors. Writing is often too complex and lengthy for readers to understand straightaway. A good editor should be able to reduce the word-count while preserving the essence of a piece of writing. They should do so more often than they do.' (50 words)

30-word target:
'Summarizing is a critical skill for editors. Writing can be too complex to understand straightaway. Editors should reduce word-counts while preserving meaning, and they should do so regularly.' (28 words)

10-word target:
'Good editing means the ability to reduce length while preserving meaning.' (11 words)

English should be a relatively easy language to learn and use. After all, it has no genders (masculine or feminine), most plurals are made by the simple addition of ‘s’, and most verbs have a past tense that ends in ‘-ed’. But of course that’s only half the story.

All languages display forms and features that ‘break the rules’. In many cases, differences come about because the written form of the language developed separately and at a different pace from the spoken form. In English, we see this in the case of

unspoken or ‘silent’ letters in words like ‘knight’ (pronounced with an initial ‘k’ sound as late as the 15th century);

added written letters like the ‘s’ in ‘island’ (it was spelt ‘iland’ until the 16th century, and is still pronounced that way);

curiosities such as the letter-group ‘ough’, which can be pronounced in multiple different ways. Try ‘Although the ploughman thought he had a cough, he found out soon enough it was a hiccough.’

semi-archaic words such as ‘aye’, ‘betwixt’, ‘ere’, ‘hither’, ‘thou’, and ‘whereof’.

Such is the fossil record of English, a language whose dynamic and turbulent past has been recorded in changes to spelling, sound and meaning over centuries.

There have been attempts to regulate and standardize the language. In the 18th and 19th centuries, dictionary-makers Samuel Johnson in England and Noah Webster in the USA used their publications to prescribe spellings based on the way they understood the evolution of language. We have Webster to thank that Americans use ‘color’, ‘honor’, ‘favor’ and ‘labor’ (modelled on Latin), instead of British equivalents like ‘colour’ and ‘honour’ (whose spelling is influenced by French).

Other attempts were less successful. Recognizing the complexity of the apostrophe — even for native users — the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw refused to use the punctuation mark in his own plays, insisting that publishers followed his instruction when printing words like ‘dont’, ‘Ive’ and ‘cant’.

And in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell foresaw the rise of an entirely ‘politically correct’ form of English. In ‘Newspeak’, language is reduced to its bare minimum, all possibilities of ambiguity stripped away, and words redesigned to reflect the binary vision of the Party: ‘goodthinkful’ referring to what is politically acceptable; and ‘ungood’ to what is not.

Newspeak may seem absurd, but in the real world many countries still try to preserve a pure or clean version of their language by committee. The Académie Française is perhaps the most well-known example. This group decides whether English words can be admitted into French, which spellings should be allowed, and even whether to keep certain written marks. In 2016 they caused a huge storm by decreeing that the circumflex accent in words such as ‘coût’ (meaning ‘cost’) should be banned, and that the word ‘oignon’ (‘onion’) should henceforth be spelt ‘ognon’.

There is no such regulation for English. The Oxford English Dictionary is often cited as an authority, but it is largely descriptive rather than prescriptive, acting more as a record of the language’s continuing evolution.

Many British English speakers disapprove of spellings such as ‘criticize’ or ‘modernize’, as if the letter ‘z’ were some devilish American plot designed to ruin ‘traditional’ English spelling forever.

Yet if these same diehards were to pick up a novel by, say, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy or George Eliot, they might be surprised at the sheer number of words spelt in this way: ‘apologize’, ‘organize’, ‘recognize’, ‘sympathize’, ‘utilize’; the list goes on.

In fact, in the literature of the 19th century this spelling is far more common than the alternative ‘-ise’ which many English children are still taught at school today. And it may surprise you to know that the spelling with ‘z’ has been preferred by the vast majority of British authors and editors from the 18th century to the present.

‘-ize’ derives originally from the ‘-izein’ ending of Greek verbs such as ostrakizein (from which we get ‘ostracize’) and baptizein (‘baptize’). And this ancient heritage is why to this day the Oxford English Dictionary gives ‘-ize’ as the preferred spelling, listing ‘-ise’ only as a variant.

Of course there are always detractors who insist on using the French-derived ‘-ise’ for all verbs, irrespective of the words’ origins. Among their number are Emily and Charlotte Bronte (but not sister Anne), and the Times newspaper (which changed from ‘-ize’ to ‘-ise’ as recently as 1992).

As you might expect, there are exceptions to everything that I have written above. These include verbs whose Latin stem ends with ‘vise’ (from videre, to see) ‘-prise’ (from prendere, to take), and ‘-mise’ (from mittere, to send). All should be spelt with ‘s’, as should ‘analyse’ and ‘catalyse’, both of which share the Greek stem ‘-lys-‘, from the verb ‘luo’, to loosen or untie.

Exceptions to the rule:

• circumcise, exercise

• analyse, catalyse

• compromise. promise, surmise

• comprise, reprise, surprise

• advertise

• advise, devise, revise, supervise
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Welsh artist and poet David Jones called his war memoir ‘In Parenthesis’ to express the in-between-ness of the First World War; it caused a rupture between the past and present, between peoples, and between cultures. But the war also had its own existence, separated off from the rest of history before and after. He recalls how glad people thought they were, in 1918, ‘to step outside its brackets’.

And that, of course, is what parentheses are, grammatically speaking. Not just the punctuation mark, but the explanatory or additional wording that goes inside the brackets.

When it comes to showing the relative significance of ideas in a sentence, there is in fact a hierarchy of punctuation marks that can be deployed: not just brackets, but also dashes, or, simply, commas.

So, which kind of punctuation should you choose? That’s partly determined by the degree of relevance of the parenthesis to the main clause. Consider the following sentences:

1. The man, who made his fortune from cookies, was an expert baker.

2. The man — who made his fortune from cookies — started out poor.

3. The man (who made his fortune from cookies) was South African.

In sentence 1, we understand that there is a strong relationship between his skill as a baker and the fact that he made money from cookies. We use commas to show that there is no real separation of detail.

In sentence 2, the fact that he was originally poor is stressed, but the source of his fortune is not so important — it just happened to be cookies.

By the time we reach sentence 3, how he made his fortune is not at all relevant, and the brackets allow us to safely remove the information about the cookies from the main thrust of the sentence.

Learning to choose which degree of separation takes practice, but one rule is absolutely sure. In all three cases, the sentence must still read correctly if we take out the parenthesis. This is a crucial test for proofreaders’ understanding of punctuation. So something like this:

4. The book (they claimed) had been stolen was found.

cannot be correct. Omitting the words in brackets gives the ungrammatical ‘The book had been stolen was found.’ But place the brackets more logically around ‘they claimed had been stolen’ and it works fine.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is a character who spends time playing with words rather than getting on with the task in hand – avenging his father’s murder.

Well, that’s the traditional view. After all, he’s usually shown clutching the famous skull, musing about life and death, rather than dealing with practical consequences.

Even the length of the play Hamlet is offered as evidence that its main character procrastinates too much.

But Hamlet has studied at university, and knows the importance of gathering evidence; and little by little we see him assembling the jigsaw, until (rather like Hercule Poirot) he has enough facts to gather the family for the grand ‘reveal’ — and with certainty point the finger at the perpetrator of the crime.

He may not be a man of action, but Hamlet is no shirk. Actually he achieves his goal because he works hard at it. When a group of actors arrives at court, he takes matters into his own hands. He even goes so far as to edit the script of their play to tell the story of his father’s death — so he can read the reactions on the audience’s faces.

Hamlet knows that each word is an essential unit of meaning, and that a sentence carefully delivered can have the power of a sword.

Presented with a text to communicate — however brief — all editors must weigh up the various options and construct as careful a version as possible in order to address not just our clients’ expectations, but our own as well.