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Customised training for organisations

Are you worried about misplaced apostrophes or other errors in your organisation's communications? Let me provide training tailored to your staff, using examples and exercises from your organisation's publications to reduce embarrassment.

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Choose from one-day refresher and intensive courses designed to expand on the English syllabus delivered at your school or longer comprehensive courses at a convenient inner north-west or south-eastern location.

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Grammar Boot Camp

Are grammar errors holding you back in work or study? Are punctuation errors putting followers off your blog?
From apostrophes to zeugma, refresh, raise and reboot your grammatical skills and communications confidence.
Grammar Boot Camp – it's training for your brain.

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Pronouns: reflexive pronoun use and Microsoft Word’s grammar checker

To start with, let’s remember what reflexive pronouns are. They are what I dubbed the ‘selfie’ pronouns: myself, ourselves, yourself, yourselves, himself, herself, itself, themselves and – a bit controversially – themself (for more on this particular pronoun, see the post on gender-neutral pronouns). We use them when we want to refer back to the

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Pronouns: ‘that’ and ‘who’ and people and animals

Use ‘who’ and ‘whom’ for people (and for words that describe people) This seems obvious but more and more writers are using that as the relative pronoun to describe people. I have two theories why this happening: partly because people are worried about misusing either who or whom and look for another word to use

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Pronouns – the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’ (cheat’s version)

Does the difference between ‘who’ and ‘whom’ really matter? No man is an island, entire of itself: every man … is a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in all mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. John

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Pronouns: the that/which problem (and understanding your MS Word grammar checker)

Relative pronouns We use relative pronouns – that, which, who and whom – to join sentences, which refer to the same noun, together. (In this post, I’ll look at the difference between that and which, and next week I’ll look at who and whom.) For example: We use relative pronouns to join sentences together. The

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Commonly confused words: wringer and ringer

In honour of International Women’s Day this coming Friday (8 March), I pay tribute to those who invented and developed washing machines, one of the great labour-saving inventions, freeing women from the hard work of boiling clothes in coppers, rinsing them and wringing them through a mangle. Washing machines have become so common that it

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Pronouns: he or she? The gender-neutral problem

Pronouns provide a quick, convenient way to refer to an earlier noun without repeating it (as it does in this sentence). But there is one problem: what pronoun can we use for a single person when we don’t know the person’s sex, given that pronouns indicate sex? For example, consider this sentence: The child paddles

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Commonly confused words: child-like and childish (and man-like, mannish, woman-like and womanish)

Child-like or childish? These two words look alike but they actually mean opposite things. Child-like means all the good things about children: child-like innocence, child-like wonder, child-like joy, child-like freedom.  You can remember it easily as all the things to like about childhood. But childish means all the things to dislike about children: childish tantrum,

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