Journal Editor

One of the main reasons for needing to rewrite a sentence is because it is ambiguous. There are several reasons why a sentence may be ambiguous, and they might not always be obvious to you as the original writer.

I follow several editing groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. I have noticed that many of the editors in these groups, particularly those from the US, describe themselves as prescriptive or descriptive.

Shall and will - does anyone care any more about using them correctly?

There are many different types of writing, so of which require expressive and descriptive language, others don’t.

One “rule” I remember being told when I first started working as a technical author was that I should not use metaphors and similes in my writing.

This article covers a few thoughts I’ve had on the use of language and how careful we need to be when writing and rewriting documentation.

I went to school in the 1970s and 80s when there was no formal grammar teaching. I therefore sometimes find myself floundering when explaining to authors why I think what they have written is wrong, because I don’t know the right technical terms to use.

As we all know, there are many words in English that have more than one meaning, but, over the past few years, I have noticed a dramatic increase in the use of words that can best be described as vague.