Is the FutureBook Conference a little elitist?

I saw a notice about "The Bookseller's FutureBook 2013 Conference". I was intrigued and went to the website to have a look at what it was all about.

It is described thus: "The Bookseller's FutureBook Conference on 21st November is Europe's biggest publishing conference - a must-attend event, packed with fantastic speakers who will challenge your thinking and help shape your strategy for 2014. A great opportunity to network and connect with over 600 industry leaders, there will be 40+ speakers, 9 sessions, 7 big ideas pitched and stimulating discussion and debate."

Sounds interesting.

I looked for where this is being held: QEII Conference Centre, Westminster. No problem.

I looked for the cost of attendance: £399 for non-subscribers (to The Bookseller). (It's £368 for subscribers.) And these prices EXclude VAT.

Now that seems a lot to me. I'm not denying that setting up the conference, paying for the venue, and presumably paying at least some of the speakers will cost a bit of money. But £478.80 to attend?

As a (very often underpaid!) small business, I don't think so.

Is it rather elitist?

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The curse of being able to read accurately

I see that Lynne Truss is giving up on lecturing people about punctuation. She’s not giving up on punctuation, just on lecturing people about it.

 

It’s a shame. It is ten years since her book on the subject, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, came out and of course she cannot be expected to carry the torch for punctuation single handed.

 

The book cannot maintain its currency for ever, even though its contents will certainly hold good for many years (we could hope for ever!). Shops stock other books; people move on and buy other books.

 

In her weekly article recently in the Sunday Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/journalists/lynne-truss/10382533/Lynne-Truss-its-no-longer-useful-to-be-able-to-read-accurately.html) Ms Truss cites several examples where missing or incorrect punctuation could have led to misunderstandings.

 

The trouble, she says, is that people expect you to be able to understand what they’re trying to say. The keywords is trying. People like Ms Truss who understand punctuation understand what people have written, not what they’re trying to write. It is a curse.

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Greengrocer's apostrophe gets an outing

Oh my, the greengrocer's apostrophe was alive and well in a south-coast seaside town recently.

In this first example, we have a perfectly used apostrophe for Kelly's of Cornwall, but a naughty apostrophe has crept into chips (also with a superfluous dot above the H!).

In addition, I do hate dots over capital Is, as in chips and pies.

In this second example the greengrocer's apostrophe gets a real good outing.

Two portions of chips and a portion of chicken nuggets get the treatment. Interestingly, judging from the spaces, three portions of chips appear to have sacrificed their apostrophes!

Incidentally, the apostrophes had no bearing on the quality of food available.

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.”