It staggers me that faults are written into newspaper headings. (I haven’t looked at whether they are carried over into digital media.) Just the other day, The Age, a once-great newspaper, published a heading on its editorial page, the one on which its various editors are named, its opinions set in stone. Over a letter to the editor, the heading said: ‘We must start to properly funding tertiary education’. Apart from the split infinitive, the ‘ing’ on the end of …
It’s as if media organisations no longer have gruff chiefs of staff who teach young reporters how to write. Many years ago my boss was the redacteur-en-chef, but that was in Paris at Agence France-Presse. Nowadays, you’ll see the words redact and redacted everywhere. In English. The Latin root of the word means to bring things together, to shape something, usually a piece of writing … Editing is the right word for it. Somehow, though, the latest usages of redact …
I certainly grinned when I was told yesterday that I’d won the UK Fiction Factory’s 2019-2020 short story prize for my yarn Last Meal. At 150 quid, the first-prize money sure ain’t Nobel-sized, but I was thrilled to come out on top in an international competition. Read my story and learn more about the Fiction Factory competition at http://www.fiction-factory.biz/.