Jesús Romero-Trillo

Category: Language

  • Isn’t there a computer program for that? | Mind your language

    Check the spelling, grammar, punctuation and facts. Then the subeditor’s real work starts Every time I go to a wedding or party, I seem to have the same conversation. Overbearing Git: “What do you do?” Me: “I’m a subeditor.” Overbearing Git: “Oh, so you’re basically a spellchecker?” Then I mumble something about there being a…

  • Bright Passages

    Now, a brief respite from carping, and another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions. After Deadline http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/bright-passages-17/

  • Learning to read in Madagascar

    16 September 2013 , Source: IRIN St Augustin Marie Louise, 46, from the village of Namakia-Ankilibe, about one hour’s drive south of Toliara, in arid southwestern Madagascar, never saw the inside of a classroom as a child.

  • ‘I’m sorry, Mr Shakespeare, you’ve failed your Key Stage 2 grammar test’

    Awful, embarrassing news about our education system from the American grammar blogger David Crystal. (Spotter’s badge to the estimable John E McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun.) Asked to include an “appropriate” adverb in the phrase “The sun shone ________ in the sky”, children were marked down for using “bright” and “dutifully”. Crystal points out, rightly…

  • Hey guess what, kids don’t speak the same as we did! Let’s be all ‘swag! Jank! Ho ho ho’

    Does anyone else slightly want to cry at that thing John Humphrys does on the Today programme about once every two years, when new slang words are put in the dictionary? You know, the thing where he pronounces each of the terms that the Youth of Today use, in a voice that suggests he is…

  • Ugly Disagreements

    Ugly Disagreements

    Singular goes with singular, plural with plural. Sounds easy. Yet agreement problems abound in our prose, between subjects and verbs, between nouns and pronouns. The perils are all familiar: phrases intervening between subject and verb that throw us off track; collective nouns that veer from singular to plural; tricky words like “each”; and, of course,…