A completely underestimated part of our constitution came into being 150 years ago today, 18th July 2022. This was the Secret Ballot Act. Before 1872, anyone emancipated by the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 would still have had no real vote. Anyone who held their land from someone else…

No one asks me for my opinion on the regulations about the diameter for a combi-boiler gas pipe. I do have some, but since plumbing is a recondite and technical subject, people assume that I take no stance. People also feel more free to spout (if you will pardon the…

Elected Christians should vote for the state to legalise things their own churches disapprove of: that is one response to Kate Forbes. Scotland’s Finance Minister said that had she been in the Parliament at the time, she would not have voted for a revision of marriage her church disapproves. It…

Sans serif fonts are without (sans) their serifs. They have a minimum of curly or angled pieces in each letter. Designers stripped them of their serifs so that a clean ‘modern’ look would result. The notion behind this is not unlike the idea which is basic to a lot of…

Not every text wants to be in plain language, or appear consistent. The very joy of modernism was its inconsistency. Ali Smith’s ‘Seasons’ quartet and Joyce’s Ulysses are deliberately variable. (The four Smith novels were written at speed, and the one big novel by Joyce had been written over years…

Plain English is about straightforward communication. It is not for every text. Shorter sentences are good. Active verbs are good. Fewer dependent clauses are good. Dependent clauses are words that hang on the main clause, which you could cut out and the main clause would still make sense. Sequencing information…

A good friend of mine is going into work to teach online. That’s right. This is a teacher, being asked to go into a school, to teach online, because the kids are not in school. The children are not in school, because most of the teachers are not in school…

Years ago I came across a poem of mine online. I did not recognise my own poem at first. This was the early days of ‘online’, and all the line breaks had gone. A magazine had done it; it had been written for print. It wouldn’t happen now. The text…

Wagnerians will know about the Gesamtkunstwerk: the complete work of art. Wagner wanted his operas to fuse and meld stage and sound so that his composition was seamless and total in all human dimensions. That went against the entire trend of society before Romanticism, which had been towards specialisation, division…