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The Engine Room
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A blog about English language use, publishing and the media in general – brought to you by a sub-editor (copy editor) on a weekly UK magazine and his former chief sub.
If you have a question about vocabulary, grammar or punctuation, why not ask
Recent Posts Tagged With 'email'
James Brown's latest request
As regular readers of this blog will know, a couple of weeks ago I received an email from James Brown wanting to know if I had sun loungers for sale.Undeterred by my lack of response, Mr Brown has written to me again - and now he's after some asymmet...
It\'s 0 Aug 2009
Pete Docherty sung about the 32nd of December, but my web mail seems to be inventing dates of its own: ...
Onward communicate
From a corporate email I received recently:Please feel free to onward communicate to your teams.I'm not sure what I like less - the verb 'onward communicate' or the lack of subject (onward communicate what?).Googling "onward communicate" only gives 6...
Alan Carr is spamming me
I've written about junk/spam email before, including one offering me an "Israel GPS Navigation System".I had another belter this week: an email informing me that I'd won half a million pounds in a Google promotion. What made it so great was that it w...
Quick and dirty with Grammar Girl
R Mason kindly pointed out that yesterday I'd been quoted in Grammar Girl's 'tip of the day' email. Here's the proof (and you may have to click on the screengrab to bring up a more legible version):I'm no longer a sub editor with a nickname, I'm a co...
Advanced word course
Here's something from The Engine Room email archive (rather shockingly, dating back to 2007). It highlights the importance of capitalisation:I got involved in an email chat today. One of my friends apologised for a late response, saying: "I've been o...
