Blog - Melanie Silver Copywriter

Apostrophe-gate! Emma Watson’s tattoo slip

March 7, 2018

With thanks to The Times columnist Carol Midgley for bringing this delightful anecdote to my attention, spare a thought for the actress and English Literature graduate Emma Watson this morning. In her rush to support the Time’s Up movement she hastily got a (thankfully temporary) tattoo, which she proudly unveiled at the Vanity Fair Oscars party. The only problem is, having overlooked the all-important apostrophe, it read “Times up”, which means nothing at all.

On realising her mistake,

Author:Melanie Silver

Categories: Blog, News, Opinion

Words count but image matters too

January 19, 2018

Having been running successfully for 22 years, my copywriting business has just had a long overdue facelift. The catalyst for change was somewhat prosaic – a dwindling stock of stationery. I could have simply gone for a reprint but recognised this presented a valuable opportunity to update my brand image, which over the years had become outdated.

Being in the marketing game, I was surprised to find that an image revamp wasn’t the straightforward process that I’d expected but instead caused me much angst and soul-searching.

Author:Melanie Silver

Categories: Blog, Grammar, News

Texts spell end of the apostrophe

January 15, 2018

Could 2018 be the year the apostrophe disappears? Greengrocers everywhere – famed for their “melon’s” and “tomatoe’s” – appear to be winning their long-running battle with grammarians over use of the apostrophe, with text use hastening the demise of the much-abused punctuation mark.

A new report[1] by a leading linguistics researcher believes that misuse has now become so prevalent – with even university students struggling to use it correctly –

Author:Melanie Silver

Categories: Blog, Grammar, News

Top chef’s grammar lands him in the soup

January 5, 2018

Top chef Marcus Wareing is known to be a perfectionist in the kitchen but he appears to pay less attention to his grammar. in the run-up to Christmas, he posted an error-strewn tweet saying: “If their is any young chefs who want’s to know what training looks like at top level take a look at tonight’s MasterChefUK.”

As grammar fans and, indeed, children everywhere will know, his tweet should have correctly read,

Author:Melanie Silver

Categories: Blog, Grammar, News, Opinion, Tips

Why that spelling misteak could be costly

December 7, 2017

Poor spelling pushes you down the search rankings

In today’s online world, typos sometimes come with a hefty price tag. A BBC report[3] suggested that a single spelling mistake on an e-commerce website can harm credibility so much that online revenues are cut in half.

If that doesn’t convince you, consider that search engines look for strings of characters in sequence so if your website contains misspellings, it is unlikely to rank highly in search results.

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Apostrophe-gate! Emma Watson’s tattoo slip

Words count but image matters too

Texts spell end of the apostrophe

Top chef’s grammar lands him in the soup

Why that spelling misteak could be costly

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