Michelle Finlay

Stationery/Stationary Paper and envelopes/Remain still

and if we see the same mistake over and over again, we begin to see it as acceptable

When using the verbs ‘sit’ and ‘stand’, in particular, it has become commonplace to use the Past Participle instead of the Present Participle. Thus people might say ‘I was sat on the bus when it began to snow’, or ‘He was stood watching the carnival’ – this form is only correct if the passive voice is being used – i.e. as if somebody had placed ‘me’ in a seated position in the bus, or had placed the man in a standing position as though we were children or toys.

If the adverb is longer than three syllables, you might find that the sentence flows better if you put it directly after the verb.

And is a connecting word – it connects words, numbers, phrases or sentences, and is sometimes used to introduce an additional comment. Roughly speaking, it means also or as well.
But it is sometimes used in place of the word to in an infinitive, as in ‘We should go and buy a new alarm clock.’ This should be ‘We should go to buy a new alarm clock.’

‘Someone has mislaid top-secret papers.

gets quite carried away

Do not ‘enquire’ rather than ‘ask’; ‘prevent’ rather than ‘stop’; or ‘attempt’ (and certainly not ‘endeavour’) rather than ‘try’.

read a Victorian novel, you will find it is heavily punctuated, a blizzard of commas, semicolons and colons; whereas recent fiction is more sparing in its comma use

Whereas the full stop, the exclamation mark and the question mark have rules to be followed, there is less that is written in stone when it comes to the comma