This piece is a gentle call for restraint – both with initial capitals and with the ampersand – in pursuit of clarity, consistency, and egalitarianism.
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The cat sat on the mat
“The cat sat on the mat” is a simple declarative sentence. Six words of one syllable. It’s not very impressive, is it? If you write stuff like that, your readers aren’t going to say, “What an impressive writer.” So let’s see how we might jazz it up and maybe unearth some techniques that will help us sound clever.
Greek scholars invented the hyphen in about the second century BC. Two thousand years later, we’re still struggling to get it right.
In my experience, proofreading is often misunderstood. It’s perceived by some as a magical process by which an un-fact-checked, poorly structured first draft can be transformed into a literary masterpiece in a couple of hours.
What’s the world’s number one language? It’s not English – at least, not if you count only native speakers. By that definition, English is third in the league table. Mandarin is first, by a long way. Then Spanish. And then English, then Hindi.
But it’s a different picture when you count those who use English as a second language.