from now on - tim reader's blog

I’m someone who could quite reasonably be described as a language Nazi, but in spite of my pedantry I’m also someone who sees language as alive and evolving. Or at least, I believe there are times to be a pedant and times to be open-minded.
So I was interested to stumble on a debate about the [...]

With a heavy sigh of relief, I’m pleased to declare that my experiment paid off.
I spent every Wednesday of the last academic year attending a fast track English A level course. Why? Well… to see what later-life learning is like, spy on the state of 6th form colleges in 2008, expand my mind… and — [...]

Innocent usually set the bar pretty high when it comes to copywriting –  particularly laudable given that they don’t hire some marketing svengali to come in and write the ‘zany’ comments on the cartons.
That’s right — Richard, Adam and Jon who co-founded it are responsible for all the silliness on the bottom, sides, top (”shake [...]

DAY FOUR
Toby and Alicia live in a palace! Their vast house with large garden and swimming pool is in the exclusive Mosman Park district, minutes from Perth via the Fremantle train line.
It’s baking hot (32 degrees and rising) but not uncomfortable. Dry heat — that’s new.
Having not seen Toby since the wedding two and a [...]

I’m about to return to school.
Or that is to say, I’ve just enrolled on an evening class studying for an A level in English Literature — first class tonight!
It’s a one-year course with only 3 hours of teaching a week. If it was 4.5 hours, it would still be approximately half the teaching hours of  [...]

No surprise that following Daphne’s newsletter of last week that she was deluged with more “websites for word geeks”. Below is list of some of them — really recommended.
I also came across a very enjoyable list of Ten Common but Easily Corrected (language) Errors — and son of — which are both instructive and a [...]

In Daphne’s recent newsletter, she lists five of the best websites for word nerds and writing geeks. As a word nerd, a writing geek AND a list freak, I’m all over this. Here they are:

Website grader allows you to enter your url to get a literary grading on your website (yet to try this [...]

I was most amused by most of Martin Amis’s contributions on BBC1’s Question Time last night, particularly the question “where’s the piss and vinegar in that?”. He was referring to a policy of David Cameron’s.
What is disappointing about this fantastic phrase is that it doesn’t mean what one might first think. It is attributed to [...]

I’ve just finished watching V for Vendetta on DVD. I’m not going to attempt any kind of dilettante review here – that’s been done – but as a bit of a words nut, I have to share V’s opening speech with you. With dialogue like this, you can imagine Stephen Fry feeling very much [...]