I’ve written before about the search engine optimisation (SEO) benefits that writing a blog can bring you (right here, actually, in the article "SEO: Blogging Is Good"). Benefits, for example, like getting indexed quickly by the search engines and getting backlinks to your site. At the risk of repeating myself, I’m going to go into [...]

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Okay, first thing: this entry isn’t going to tell you everything about commas. We’d be here for a week if I tried to do that. Today I’m going to be talking about how to use commas when you start a sentence with a subordinate clause. A subobadiba-what? Calm down, take a deep breath. Ready? Let’s [...]

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I’ve been reading a book on productivity recently and one of the things it focuses on is procrastination. When you know there’s something you have to do, but just can’t get your head around actually doing it. Not because you’re too busy or because it’s too hard; just because you just can’t force yourself to [...]

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And not just "learnt" and "learned"; how about "burnt" and "burned", "leant" and "leaned"? Could it be any more confusing? One of each pair must be wrong. Right? Actually, no. It’s yet another example of the difference between British and American English. In this case, the Americans are regular. We’re irregular. Each verb has both [...]

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Today’s entry is specifically to do with deciding which of these sentences is correct: Mugenkyo is an internationally-renowned group of Japanese drummers. Mugenkyo is an internationally renowned group of Japanese drummers. Can you see the difference? No? Look a bit harder. There you go. It’s the difference between "internationally-renowned" and "internationally renowned". Do we hyphenate [...]

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