English spelling is tricky: that is something most people agree on. There are a couple of pairs of words that a particularly troublesome for a lot of people: practice and practise, and licence and license. Prophecy and prophesy follow the same rules, but as prophesy in particular isn’t commonly used (prophesise seems to have taken
It’s one of the trickiest punctuation dilemmas: when you are using direct speech, and you break what the speaker says, do you put the comma before or after the closing quotation mark? Should it be ‘I went shopping’, Tim said, ‘to buy a new suit for the wedding’. or ‘I went shopping,’ Tim said, ‘to
One of the most widely known grammar rules is ‘don’t use a comma before and‘. Unfortunately, while this applies most of the time, there are a number of cases where we must use a comma before and. The rule really should be ‘don’t use a comma before and, unless it is needed to make your
Abbreviations Abbreviations generally should be avoided in written English – it is always better to spell words out in full – but every now and again it is handy to use a shortened form of a common word. We might not have a lot of space (for example, in labelling columns, as in a calendar
In Australia, it is quite simple, if ungrammatical and plain stupid. A bureaucratic body ( the Geographical Names Board) decided back in 1966 that no Australian place names should contain possessive apostrophes. This means we are stuck with wrong-looking (and, in my view, plain wrong) names such as Devils Marbles (thankfully, we can use the