If you find yourself writing many emails, see if you can create some email templates. These are excellent ways to make writing emails more efficient and streamlined. Why keep repeating your writing efforts when you could create templates which are easy to modify?

Email Templates can help:

• Answering similar questions.
• Save Time
• Create a professional, carefully thought out answer, which you can use again and again with minor personal touches.

Continue reading →

How about this for a bad sentence:
It is a comment from the Association of Chief Police officers in response to the Government’s Green Paper

“The promise of reform which the Green paper heralds holds much for the public and Service alike; local policing, customized to local need with authentic answerability, strengthened accountabilities at force level through reforms to police authorities and HMIC, performance management at the service of localities with targets and plans tailored to local needs, the end of centrally engineered one size fits all initiatives, an intelligent approach to cutting red tape through redesign of processes and cultures, a renewed emphasis on strategic development so as to better equip our service to meet the amorphous challenges of managing cross force harms, risks and opportunities.”

It has been nominated for a gobbledegook award.

When it comes to writing sentences, I suggest you don’t follow the bad example of so called literary giants and philosophers. I remember reading ‘On Liberty’ By John Stuart Mill and despairing at the sheer length and complexity of his sentences.

Some simple tips for writing sentences

• Noun and Verb. ‘Jesus Ran’ Is the shortest sentence in the Bible and is perfectly adequate.
• It is better to start off with simple sentences and write longer, more involved sentences as you develop as a writer. This is a better strategy than starting with long sentences.
• Don’t try to include too much into one sentence. Two separate ideas should be separated.
• For variety, occassional consider using a semi colon; this allows you to expand on the initial idea, but, it should be related. Often semi colons could be turned into two sentences, but, their use can just give an additional fluidity to writing.
• Be wary of complicated sub clauses. which lead the reader off on a tangent.
• If you can express an idea with less words, then that is good.

The New Uxbridge English Dictionary is now available for sale.

Following on from the very popular Uxbridge English dictionary, the new version offers a range of new words and an interesting take on their meaning.

Cursory; A place where children learn to swear

Mumps; Heaps of unwanted mothers

Halitosis; Bad breath brought on by a comet

Baccanalian; To bet on a martian

Chiropractise; To get ready for a trip to Egypt

Senile; What to do whilst in Egypt

Canape; Scottish inability to settle bills

Canneloni; Scottish refusal of your request for an Overdraft

Acne; A dyslexics walking stick

Warming; A Geordies chinese vase

Binmen; Post-op Transexuals

Groin; The ‘GO’ light in Birmingham

Thesauras; A disorder following consumption of curry

Amish; Similar to an Arm

Caesarian Section; Part of a salad

Navigate; Scandal involving road menders

at Amazon.co.uk

The Real Meaning of words – examples from original book

“You know..” There are many words which we use unnecessarily.

We use them subconsciously without realising:

• How frequently we use them
• How they add nothing to the conversation
• And how they can irritate people.
• How they can sound condescending

A common example is adding ‘you know’ to the start of sentences. ‘You know, people speak too much.’

Examples of Unnecessary Words

• Actually,
• I mean
• Well,

All these words can also convey a kind of condescension.

I am making a big effort to remove these unnecessary words. Speak less, say more. Silence is good.

Jeremy Paxman (University Challenge, BBC2): What is another name for “cherrypickers” and “cheesemongers”?

Contestant: Homosexuals.

Paxman: No. They’re regiments in the British Army who will be very upset with you.

Phil Wood (BBC Radio Manchester): What’s 11 squared?

Contestant: I don’t know.

Phil Wood: I’ll give you a clue. It’s two ones with a two in the middle.

Contestant: Is it five?

Answer: 121

Richard Madeley (Richard and Judy): On which street did Sherlock Holmes live?

Contestant: Er…

Richard: He makes bread.

Contestant: Er…

Richard: He makes cakes.

Contestant: Kipling Street?

Answer: Baker Street

Question (BRMB Radio): What religion was Guy Fawkes?

Contestant: Jewish.

Host: That’s close enough.

Answer: Roman Catholic

Steve Le Fevre (The Biggest Game in Town, ITV): What was signed to bring World War I to an end in 1918?

Contestant: Magna Carta?

Answer: Treaty of Versailles

Phil Wood (BBC GMR): What ‘K’ could be described as the Islamic Bible?

Contestant: Er…

Phil: It’s got two sylla-bles… Kor…

Contestant: Blimey?

Phil:Ha ha ha, no. The past participle of run…

Advertisement – article continues below »

Contestant: Silence

Phil:Okay, try it another way. Today I run, yesterday I…

Contestant: Walked?

Answers: Koran&ran

Melanie Sykes (The Vault): What name is given to the condition where the sufferer can fall asleep at any time?

Contestant: Nostalgia.

Answer: Narcolepsy

Steve Wright (Radio 2): Johnny Weissmuller died on this day. Which jungles-winging character clad in a loin cloth did he play?

Contestant: Jesus.

Answer: Tarzan

Chris Searle (BBC Radio Bristol): In which European country is Mount Etna?

Contestant: Japan.

Chris: I did say European country… I can let you try again.

Contestant: Er… Mexico?

Answer: Italy

Paul Wappat (BBC Radio Newcastle): How long did the Six Day War between Egypt and Israel last?

Contestant: (long pause) 14 days.

Answer: Six days

Daryl Denham (Virgin Radio): In which country would you spend shekels?

Contestant: Holland?

Daryl: Try the next letter of the alphabet.

Contestant: Iceland? Ireland?

Daryl: It’s a bad line. Did you say Israel?

Contestant: No.

Answer: Israel

JAMIE THEAKSTON: Where is Cambridge University?

CONTESTANT: Geography isn’t my strong point

JAMIE THEAKSTON: There’s a clue in the title

CONTESTANT: Leicester?

LINCS FM DJ: Which is the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world?

CONTESTANT Barcelona

LINCS FM DJ: I was really after the name of a country

CONTESTANT; I’m sorry, I don’t know the name of any countries in Spain

GWR FM DJ: What happened in Dallas on November 22, 1963?

CONTESTANT I don’t know, I wasn’t watching it then

ROCK FM PRESENTER: Name a film starring Bob Hoskins that is also the name of a famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci

CONTESTANT Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

BEACON RADIO DJ: What is the nationality of the Pope?

CONTESTANT I think I know that one. Is it Jewish?

BAMBER GASCOIGNE What was Gandhi’s first name?

CONTESTANT Goosey?

JAMES O’BRIEN, LBC: How many kings of England have been called Henry?

CONTESTANT Er, well, I know there was a Henry the Eighth.. er, er, three?

LOTTERY HOST: What is the world’s largest continent?

CONTESTANT The Pacific?

Apostrophes in street signs have been banned by a council because its staff spend too much time dealing with complaints about grammar.

From now on, no sign produced by Birmingham City Council will contain the punctuation mark.

Debates over whether Kings Norton really should be King’s – or even Kings’ – Norton may rage on, but they will be useless.

And nearby Druids Heath – which was never actually home to one, let alone many, druids – will never take on the possessive, no matter how furious local apostrophe advocates become.

The council said the move had been taken for the purposes of consistency and to avoid costs and confusion over whether place names should ever take an apostrophe.

However the decision was described as “absolute defeatism” by John Richards, the founder of the Apostrophe Protection Society.

from: Telegraph

The simplest is when an apostrophe replaces a letter

• It is = It’s.
• I am = I’m

Singular Possessive.

An Apostrophe is used to indicate possession.

• E.g. Richard’s computer. (the computer belonging to Richard)

Singular Possessive ending in s

• Socrates’ discourses (the teachings of Socrates)

Plural Possessive

If many people are involved we put the apostrophe at the end

• The nurses’ uniform (the uniform belonging to the many nurses.)

Google’s grip on the internet seems to take on far reaching proportions, there seems to be no area that Google don’t seek to dominate.

Recently, they bough Feedburner. Last week, there was a notice that we would have to swtich over to Google Feedburner, so I made the switch. In the process, I seemed to lose about 40% of my hard won readers. On some blogs it was more than 50%.

• 8 Effective ways to increase RSS readership

Before upgrading wordpress, it is always advisable to save a copy of your mysql database.

1. An easy way is to install WP automatica database backup - this saves going into phpMyadmin. Once installed just click link and backup a copy of database to computer. It can be uninstalled after backing up a database.
2. WordPress automatic upgrade Just install and follow simple instructions. It has worked fine for me.

Improve Performance of WordPress

• WP-cache Install and then activate. you can increase the expiration time from 3600 to 9993600 to make it more static.
• WP-Super Cache offers even better performance making pages static. It requires rewriting .htaccess. Though if the file is writable it will do it automatically. Wp-super cache also enables you to just run ordinary wp-cache

Virtual Private Server is like a private server because you have guaranteed a minimum amount of disc space and CPU usage. The advantage is that you are not at the mercy of other sites on a shared hosting company. You can also often have more CPU usage an. However, Virtual Private servers can have their own problems, especially if you don’t get a managed VPS.

vHost didn’t work well. The server crashed twice in our first 30 days so we got our money back. Though someone else said it has performed well.

Dreamhost VPS. This is quite easy to use and you can select how much CPU use and mysql database you want to buy. When I tried it, the VPS was very new and my sever kept going down and manually needed restarting by me. The effect was that I had far more down time than on shared hosting. Fortunately, I was able to move back to shared hosting. This problem may have been resolved by now, though.

Hostican VPS. So far so good. For VPS, we recommend choosing managed VPS, it is more expensive; I know some who had problems with DNS on a non managed Hostican VPS.

This is the 3 hosts we have tried. But, I’m still looking for a reliable, good value private server with high resource availability