For centuries, written communication was tinged with formality and finality. But since the emergence of casual forms like texting, using proper grammar can be fraught with misinterpretation.
Everyone knows that in the sentence “Jane is washing her”, the pronoun “her” cannot refer back to Jane. Over the last four decades, researchers have established that adults reject the interpretation of…
While 2013 was all about schools and their funding (remember Gonski, anyone?), 2014 was the year of higher education reform. Or, at least, proposed higher education “reform”. With cuts to higher education…
Being able to communicate effectively in a foreign language is a challenge faced by many of us. If you’re a newcomer to a country, conveying a message in a language that is not your mother tongue is often…
Music is what penetrates most deeply into the recesses of the soul, according to Plato. Language has been held by thinkers from Locke to Leibniz and Mill to Chomsky as a mirror or a window to the mind…
We know a good piece of writing when we read it. But what makes the writing “good” and how can we teach all our kids the skills that seem to come naturally to a few. Here are six principles teachers and…
It has become commonplace to hear that English is now a sort of “global” language, or lingua franca. Although this might be partly true, is it right to draw the conclusion that native speakers of English…
Writer Will Self grabbed headlines earlier this week by referring to George Orwell as the “Supreme Mediocrity”. He wrote: The curious thing is that while during the post-war period we’ve had many political…
It’s not often that grammar makes the news, but there’s currently a good natured spat going on between Melvyn Bragg and John Humphrys. Bragg hosts a long running BBC Radio discussion show called In Our…
Sticklers beware. The British Library is hosting it’s English Grammar Day, a day to finely split hairs over split infinitives, apostrophe’s (sic, sic, sic), and Oxford commas (sick!). Yes, in the case…
You have to look long and hard to find a joke with “grammar” in the punchline. But recently, a very funny grammar joke turned up on Twitter, thanks to the American Nazi Party, which feels bound to maintain…
If you think that young people seem to be spending more of their time “face-to-screen” than “face-to-face”, you’re probably right. And a lot of that screen time seems to involve reading or writing English…
In a recent enquiry into alleged sexual abuses by priests, Cardinal George Pell said: Mistakes were made by me and by others in the church that resulted in driving Mr Ellis and the archdiocese apart rather…