It’s not uncommon to read or hear a news story about a car colliding with a tree … or a fence … or a wall. That can never be so, […]

So, what exactly is an “adjectival phrase” and why do writers need to take care when using one? An adjectival phrase is a series of words that describe, qualify or […]

Sometimes the subtlety of punctuation use escapes writers, especially those who are not all that familiar with employing – some might say quaint – typographical marks such as the hyphen […]

It’s pretty sad when our Prime Minister hasn’t got his head around the correct use of the word neither. Sadly, he’s not alone. Yesterday, the PM was criticising his opposite […]

  Well, I’ve now reached 25 Style Matters posts on the reporting4work.com.au website over the past few months and still have plenty of potential entries to add to this growing […]

I’m tiring of seeing the wanton use of the exclamation mark(!), aren’t you? Advertisers and marketers overuse it, email writers seem to employ it with gay abandon and I’ve even […]

Granted, the apostrophe has two rather different main roles when punctuating sentences, but its distinct applications are not that difficult to learn, remember and apply. Yet the oft-abused apostrophe is […]

While most writers are encouraged to minimise the use of capital (upper case) letters – because they have a tendency to arrest the eye and slow down the reader – […]

I’ve recently noticed our esteemed and usually linguistically precise news personnel on our national broadcaster have been referring to people who come from Afghanistan as Afghanis. However, the word Afghani […]