Insights archive
Red Pony is a team of writers, editors, Microsoft Office template developers and communications trainers. We have been writing about our areas of expertise for over a decade in our Red Pony Express newsletter.
This collection features the best articles from the last 10 years.
Commas say something in adjective pairs
Adjectives describe people, animals and objects, and in doing so, particularise and identify them. They answer questions like what kind, how many and which one? It’s hard to imagine a world without adjectives, but I’d like to see a science fiction writer try.
Nouns for the masses
Noun words are members of an extensive family, but their variety can be confusing.
How a missing comma cost $13 million
Now a court in the US state of Maine has determined that an absence of a comma has cost a trucking company $US10 million (approximately AU$13 million) in unpaid overtime.
The unexpected history of ‘Mrs’
The use of ‘Ms’, once controversial, is now mainstream. But it’s not so long ago it was viewed as political correctness gone mad. Personally, it’s bizarre to imagine that complete strangers ever felt entitled to know whether or not I am married.
Forensic linguists identify criminals by their writing style
The way you write – the length of your sentences, your use of punctuation, or your intractable belief that ‘professional’ should have two Fs in it – creates a linguistic ‘fingerprint’ that can be used to identify you. Forensic linguists have been tasked with examining blackmail letters, death threats, potentially faked suicide notes and even historical items, such as the famous ‘Bixby letter’, supposedly penned by Abraham Lincoln, but a matter of fierce debate.
The truth about texting
Are you really committing a grievous error by using correct punctuation in text messages? A recent study out of the US getting a lot of media attention seems to suggest exactly that. But how much can we really read into their findings?
Barbarous mutilations
This brings us to the thorny matter of punctuation. All these abbreviations lost their full stop long ago. Even some relatively new ones, like app for application, are allowed to stand alone (and obviously, using full stops when tweeting and texting would defeat the purpose of the abbreviations that have developed, if u c wot I mean. But in formal text, what is the convention for punctuating words that still feel like abbreviations?
Using the hyphen
As an editor I spend quite a lot of time looking things up in the dictionary. The most common reason for me to do this is to check whether or not a word or phrase should be hyphenated.
Beware the dangling modifier
What’s wrong with these sentences?
Yesterday, after conferring with my senior national security advisers and following extensive consultations with our coalition partners, Saddam Hussein was given one last chance. (President Bush in the Chicago Tribune, 1991)
Driving home recently, a thick pall of smoke turned out to be Deepak’s bungalow, well alight.
Time to get with the program/me
Under the new dispensation of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, there are going to be a few changes. But here at Red Pony we’ll restrict our discussion to the orthographical changes (that’s ‘spelling’ to you and me).
Behold the contronym
Like platypuses and echidnas, those creepy monotremes of the animal kingdom, the world of words contains a few rare and paradoxical oddities of its own. Consider the contronym.
For ‘whom’, the bell tolls
When was the last time you wrote ‘whom’? When was the last time you said it? I’ll bet the former happened more recently than the latter. As any change in the spoken language is invariably the precursor to a change in the written language, the writing has been on the wall — so to speak — for ‘whom’ for quite some time.
If you type two spaces after a full stop, you’re wrong!
Despite its prevalence, a double space at the end of a sentence is simply incorrect.
Ask the punctuation doctor
While the correct use of en or em dashes can bring clarity to a sentence that contains a number of complicated, interconnected ideas, in a lot of cases it can be better to break such a long sentence down into shorter ones. As an exercise, this is worth trying. It can help you pare an idea down to its essentials and force the subsidiary material to justify its presence. Maybe you don’t need those parenthetical statements after all?
Episodes in the archaeology of spelling
Spelling in the English language can sometimes seem a very arbitrary proposition. Aside from the peculiarities within the language itself, there’s the long list of variations between US and British/Australian usage.
The passive voice
The passive voice gets a bad press. From Don Watson to the Microsoft Word green squiggle under so many of our sentences, it has no shortage of critics. But if it’s so bad, what’s it doing in the English language anyway?
Let me quote you on that
Attention pedants! If you’re looking for a fight, there’s no better field of battle than punctuation. Obviously the apostrophe is the punctuation mark that gets people the most steamed up, but the quotation mark or ‘inverted comma’ runs a close second.
Verbing nouns
But where does experimentation with language stop and gibberish start? A recent article in the Boston Globe tackled the problem of ‘verbing’ nouns. What? Well, when you verb a noun you are – just like it sounds – turning it into a verb.
Spelling traps – licence/license and practice/practise
The closest competitors for the stationary/stationery pairing (one of which, hopefully the correct one, you’ll find in my article above) for the title of Most Confused Spelling are the practice/practise and licence/license combinations.
Rogue adjectives and adverbs
After wading through the fragrant fields of florid prose that can be the unmistakeable hallmark of some popular fiction, you may think overuse of adjectives and adverbs wouldn’t be such an issue in the drab world of business writing. Well … you’d be right, up to a point.