Journal Editor

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.

Let’s start with the basics — what are prepositions? A preposition is a word that governs, and usually precedes, a noun or pronoun and expresses a relation to another word or element.

It could be that most of you will skip this article and think that I am teaching my grandmother to suck eggs, but these errors are appearing more frequently in the manuscripts I edit, so I thought I’d use this page to highlight them.

Why do so many people insist that you can’t split infinitives in English? Are they right? Does it bother you? Is it something that we even need to consider?

Let’s start with the basics – what are prepositions? A preposition is a word that governs, and usually precedes, a noun or pronoun and expresses a relation to another word or element.

In most situations there is no difficulty in deciding whether a subject takes a singular or plural form. However, there are situations that cause problems.