It would be hard to claim that marketing content is always readable. Marketing language is so riddled with jargon and unnecessary complexity that it’s been vilified in newspaper articles and online listicles (and it isn’t as if journalists aren’t liable to throwing out a little of their own ‘journalese’ now and again). We articulated the
In 1946, George Orwell––novelist, essayist, journalist and critic––extolled the virtues of simple writing in the essay ‘Politics and the English Language’ and condensed his guidance to writers into six rules: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word
Last week, while watching the video of Mary Beard’s excellent London Review of Books Winter Series lecture on Women in Power, I was struck by her focus on language – in particular on the way in which language that excludes women from power has become part of our everyday lexicon. Women, Beard points out, are
