BBC - use a proofreader, please

Oh dear, oh dear BBC!

This appeared on our screens on the South East local news programme following the Ten o'clock News on earlier this week:

This error, using "then" rather than "than", is sometimes found of people who do not use English as their first language, and sometimes of youngsters who are not widely experienced in writing.

It is not an error we expect from the BBC.

As we all know, errors can easily creep into our writing, but ... maybe the BBC is too lazy to use a decent proofreader.

OUGH - there's a thoroughly rough thought!

The English language has many interesting facets. It is this that makes it fascinating.

One area of interest is pronunciation and one simple sequence of four letters has an amazing range of pronunciations, depending on the word they are in.

The sequence is O-U-G-H.

Here are a number of words that use this sequence and you'll know how to say them:

rough
through
thorough (as in UK English: e.g. thurra)
thorough (as in US English: e.g. thurro)
bough
thought
cough
dough

That's eight. Have I missed any?

What a great language. It must be terrible to learn!

See our website at WriteItClearly.com.

Girl Spots McDonald's Errors

A ten-year-old aspiring writer was astonished to find errors on a poster while enjoying a meal at McDonald’s with her family.

Emily Cox read the poster which advertises face painting sessions for children. The first error which she spotted was a superfluous apostrophe in the word Saturdays. She then realised that there was an apostrophe missing from “children’s holidays”, and noticed various other mistakes.

The budding proofreader commented: “I was quite surprised because they are a big company and there were a lot of mistakes. I like to read stories and would like to be an author when I’m older but I haven’t made up my mind completely yet.”

Emily’s mother Angela expressed her surprise that a company such as McDonald’s had made such mistakes on a corporate poster. She said that she and Emily had enjoyed “a very interesting and funny conversation” after the clever girl had explained why the poster was incorrect.

A spokesman for McDonald’s confirmed that the company would be withdrawing the poster and that it would be sending Emily books as a reward for her grammatical astuteness.

She said: “We apologise for the grammatical errors on one of our posters and congratulate the clever, eagle-eyed girl who spotted them.”

-IZE or -ISE, which is the suffix?

When we proofread documents to UK English, we always change the suffix -ize to -ise. I decided to look into the history of this.

'Oxford spelling' uses -ize as a suffix in preference to -ise. Example words are organize, privatization, realize. There are, apparently, about 200 verbs that are affected. The basis for the use of -ize comes from the Greek origins of words, the root being -izo for -ize words.

Nevertheless, -ise has become the preferred usage in UK English, from sometime in the 1990s. Now, -ize is often thought to be US English and incorrect UK English, though this is not technically true.

Words that use the suffix -yse are not affected by this argument as they come from a different Greek root. Thus, -yse IS UK English, and -yze is US English.

It's enlightening stuff.

So, although it is not necessary to change -ize to -ise for UK English, the key (as always, in proofreading) is consistency.

There's a good full article about Oxford spelling to be found here on Wikipedia.

Poor Spelling - Reduced Sales

Xmas is coming and the menus are coming out! Why not check out what's on offer and see if you can spot the deliberate mistakes. For instance, compost of lamb? Could ir possibly be compote of lamb...? These little mistakes are amusing but sometimes can be harmful to a company's reputation.

Charles Duncombe is an entrepreneur who has an issue with bad spelling and reckons that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds. This concerns online businesses, and according to an analysis he undertook on website figures, a single spelling mistake can cut online sales by 50%. According to the report in the BBC News,

"The concerns were echoed by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), whose head of education and skills warned that too many employers were having to invest in remedial literacy lessons for their staff."

If you come across a website that has been badly spell checked with poor grammar, you are less likely to trust it. The solution? Invest in a reputable and established proofreading service, such as writeitclearly.com and get it right first time.

Writing It Right

Righting a Write

Why is it that we get so uptight when we notice a spelling mistake? Sometimes they are unimportant and merely annoying, but at other times, they can have a very vital role to play. Take the spam emails from the banks. They look authentic, the content is correct, and they seem legitimate. So if they ask me to enter my account details,  there is nothing that alarms me. But wait ... look closely and check the spelling, in particular the hyperlink details as you hover over a link. Is Lloyds or Barclays or Santander spelt correctly? No? Then you're being scammed.

Correct Spelling

This is just one example of how correct spelling can help you from making a big and potentially costly mistake. The same applies to documents. One little error can affect the whole meaning of what you are trying to say. You can't rely on spell check on your computer as this only corrects the spelling without looking at the meaning behind it. Leave it to the experts and call writeitclearly.com to perfect your work!

WriteItClearly.com's new blog

Hi there,
WriteItClearly.com has a new blog and we hope you read it, like it, follow it, contribute to it - all those good things.

You can find our other blog on our website at writeitclearly.com/blogspot1.php. Have a look there for a range of articles on writing topics.

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On here we hope to add a few photos of errors we find - we hope to make the subject fun and interesting, so come back and join us often!

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