Although people regularly make fun of the Australian vernacular and snigger at the likes of Kath and Kim, beginner reporters, broadcasters and writers everywhere need to catch themselves before they […]
Following on from yesterday’s mega-posting on getting attribution right, there is one bad habit creeping into reported speech that we should expunge from published news stories. It is particularly noticeable […]
Whether you work in a busy newsroom, a home office or for a magazine or book publisher, how you handle quoted speech is a clear marker of your professionalism. I […]
Here’s a quick tip for a Monday morning. There’s a simple way to remember whether to use practice or practise in a sentence. As n (for the noun) comes before […]
How do writers know when their copy is pitched at the right level for their target audience to comprehend? Is the copy so “dense” that its readers will struggle to […]
Substituting spoken words with more precise words in parentheses when quoting a speaker is an art form that some news writers seem to have all mixed up. The dilemma usually […]
Curbing the tendency to pollute your writing with clichés is important for a professional reporter or writer. Australian television news, at present, seems to be having an inexplicably lazy preoccupation […]
Carrying on from a suggestion in yesterday’s Style Matters posting on missing punctuation, let’s look a bit closer at how writers can pick up more mistakes before their work is […]
In the rush to file stories or wrap up a manuscript, reporters and writers often overlook the simplest things, such as missing punctuation marks, which can alter intended meaning in […]
Australia is in the midst of yet more voting madness and we are counting the days until the outcome of the “most important federal election in a generation” is declared, […]
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