ABSTRACT

23“Unfortunately you have had the benefit of an education by semi-literate academics who think they can write,” said my first editor on the first day of my first job in journalism. And he was right too. The problem with these semi-literate academics that taught us at university was that they slavishly obeyed all sorts of obscure grammatical tics and yet ignored the absolute basics of good written English. It’s like the trainee surgeon who skips the chapter on hygiene: utterly self-defeating.