Take a Break magazine, May 28, 2020
I am quite sorry about this entry because in my experience Take a Break is extremely accurate. This is a rare error.
A fretful baby ‘grizzles’ so is ‘grizzly’. ‘Grisly’ means gruesome or hideous, as in a monster. While we are about it, there is ‘gristly’ which refers to something disgusting in meat, and ‘grizzly’ can also mean a type of bear or hair that is greying.
i newspaper, June 20, 2020
Times, June 20, 2020
The word ‘but’ seems often to be used as a bit of padding between two other words, but it does have a meaning, viz that what follows is a contrast or a surprise.
The top cutting contains two sets of unrelated ideas which cannot be made meaningful simply by adding ‘but’. In the heading, there is no reason why the lockdown should have had any effect one way or the other on sales of vinyl. ‘And’ would be better than ‘but’. In the intro, the juxtaposition is simply odd. The sneezing reference needs to be cut or put elsewhere. This is a classic non sequitur: a suggestion that one idea follows the other when they have nothing at all to do with each other.
In the second cutting, there is no reason why the location of the machine should have any bearing on whether or not it is used, so again ‘and’ is more appropriate than ‘but’.
Sunday Times, June 14, 2020
A basic of subbing is that you make it clear who is speaking before you begin the quote. Here it looks as if the estate agent, Mr Lillicrap, is continuing to talk about sales, when in fact it has switched to Alex Polizzi. So when you get to the end of the par you are brought up short by the fact that it is a new speaker, and you go back to sort it out. The reader should never have to feel any confusion.
After the par about the estate agent, this is how it should be done.
Alex Polizzi, owner of the Hotel Tresanton which overlooks St Mawes harbour, hopes to re-open on July 4.
‘People come away to have a good time,’ she said. ‘I don’t want them to be met with pitchforks . . . new realities.
‘I appreciate all the concerns . . . open for business.’