Hello. I’m Holly Brockwell, and I’m a mostly-digital Copywriter living in London.
On this blog I talk about advertising, writing, and anything else that catches my eye. Mostly in rant format. Sometimes I don’t post for a while, but it just means I’m busy – I always come back.
Here’s where else you can find me:
You can email me at: copybotblog at gmail.com.
Note: all opinions and outbursts of rage on this blog belong to me and no-one else. This means don’t nick them, and don’t hold my employer accountable for them.
I noticed your lists of “top 50…Wikipedia” etc. as it was linked from Fark.Com. I thank you for that as I needed yet another excuse to spend more time on the internet
I just read this page “About Copybot” and wanted to ask your opinion on something. A friend on Facebook had posted a comment about the Apostrophe Protection Society
http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/ – which is a worthwhile cause to be sure but I think there is a much bigger cause to be taken on: I have noticed that (at least the online versions of) major U.K. newspapers have an epidemic of what appear to be randomly placed quotation marks in their headlines and in the article texts.
For example, I just took a random sampling of BBC headlines from my RSS newsfeeder (no quotes added by me):
Recession ‘worse than estimated’
Fatal flat fire ‘not suspicious’
Concert backs ‘Gandhi of Sahara’ (this one appears legit as it is a nickname)
Australian aims to breed ‘green’ sheep that burp less
hey just stumbledupon your blog, gotta say I love it! I’m getting back into freelance writing (amongst several other things) and copywriting has been one of the realms I’ve been dying to jump it. I’m a journalist by degree but got my first paid copywriting gig a couple weeks ago. I thought it was crap but I got paid and can put it on my resume. I’ll be visiting more.
Bill, sorry for not having responded to your comment sooner, I only just spotted it.
The apostrophes, or in actual fact single quotes, in those BBC headlines are completely correct where they are. What they denote is that the part of the sentence in quotes is according to someone else. So for example in “Fatal flat fire ‘not suspicious’”, the article would go on to say that the police, or neighbours, or someone else has been quoted as saying that the fatal flat fire does not appear to be suspicious.
You often see these headlines with an attribution after the part in quotes, eg “Fatal flat fire ‘not suspicious’, say neighbours”.
Hope that clears it up