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More proof that those who run the country don’t care about standards of literacy in the UK.

The minister responsible for education (repeat: for education) has been criticised for having a blog rife with spelling mistakes.

It’s obvious Jim Knight’s blog is written by someone else (an exploited young graduate of a new university, no doubt), because the minister himself went to Cambridge when that institution still demanded decent English in its students. (Something that’s not necessarily the case now – a friend who teaches at Oxford once told me that he’s expected to award marks for correct spelling and grammar in lit crit essays).

No wonder we “word warriors” are a growing band, according to this article.

A new post over at the Daily Writing Tips blog discusses the contentious issue of paragraph length (gosh, we writers really are a sad bunch).

You know, that old rule drilled into us at school about never, ever, writing a paragraph that’s less than three sentences long.

I’m afraid I disagree with this ridiculously prescriptive idea. What if you can say what you’re trying to say in just two sentences? (more…)