Sydney-based ‘Grammar Guru’ Deb Doyle upskills journalists to boost their wordsmithing skills and is available to comment on Australia’s grammar standards.
Do you apply the four C’s of communication by writing clearly, coherently, consistently and correctly?
No one has time to re-read your paragraph, sentence, clause, phrase or word because you’ve unwittingly made war with the reader by producing copy that’s waffly, ambiguous and ridiculous.
To make peace with your readers, you need to put them first by making your documents pleasant, effective, alive, clear and enduring.
Aussie ‘Grammar Guru’ Deb Doyle is on a mission to prevent the death of meaning in the media. 2GB presenter Deborah Knight has made her the station’s go-to grammar expert and has interviewed her and invited her to participate in listener phone-ins three times. The topics were the nation’s declining NAPLAN standards, literacy crisis and mispronunciation problems.
Deb Doyle's 'Back to Basics' interview on 2GB's 'Afternoons with Deborah Knight', 2022
Deb has helped people as old as 85 and as young as 11 eliminate embarrassing errors in their writing and bring it to an acceptable standard.
She’s been so enraged by the avoidable errors that Nine Entertainment journos and editors (for example) are inflicting on the public that she’s sent the company three letters of complaint. How can journalists and editors know that using the comma splice – placing a comma between two sentences – is wrong if they haven’t learned that a grammatical clause comprises a subject, verb and predicate or that a sentence can be simple, compound, complex or compound–complex? One ‘letter of complaint’ recipient claimed she and her contributors were doing their best to prevent publication of ‘howlers’, but their best clearly isn’t good enough. Where’s the ‘sub’?
Comma splice: We are not torn apart by differences, we are torn apart by contempt. [two statements (declarative sentences)]
Ambiguity: While many people thought Hadley’s sympathies leaned against Labor, Minns recalled, ‘You said, “If you come on my program I’ll give you a go every day of the week.”’ [ambiguous subordinating conjunction | personification of ‘Hadley’s sympathies’]
Ridiculousness: (1) Mr Packer was engaged to former swimsuit Jodhi Meares. (2) Unlike other contraceptive devices, Essure can be inserted in your doctor’s office. [unintended humour]
The decline started in 1972, when Australian educators removed traditional grammar from the secondary-school English curriculum, in favour of having students express themselves creatively and learn grammar ‘by osmosis’. Teachers lost the whole body of knowledge, so several generations of us here Down Under have been unable to use the world’s universal language to make our meaning clear on the first read. Personal computers have been with us since the early 1980s, the Internet since the mid-’90s, and AI is flavour of the 2020s. None can be a substitute for the human brain.
Fun fact: An effective way to help people picture the action we’re writing about is to use a lot of verbs – the ‘action’ words we use to indicate doing, being or having. Have you recognised that all the verbs in this press release are colour coded green?
Pain-free professional development
Deb Doyle has been teaching grammar and editing since 1995 and delivering popular ‘boot camps’ at the Centre for Continuing Education since 2009. She continues to receive positive evaluations from her corporate, government and individual clients.
She uses her many years of experience as both a teacher and a copy editor to not only educate participants but entertain them, face to face at the workplace or via Zoom or Teams.
She’s been publishing her text-workbook Grey Areas and Gremlins: A grammar and punctuation refresher since 2003, and she uses it and its unique supplementary course notes to help all-comers advance their written English happily and free of pain.
She can customise your group learning or one-on-one tuition by copy editing your own sample documents, including tracking the changes, indicating any author queries and colour coding each clause’s subject, verb and predicate.
Having created or upgraded many in-house style guides and editorial stylesheets (A-to-Z word lists), she can guarantee a superlative overhaul of yours.
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In 2025, Deb wants to (1) reach more Australians via media interviews and participate in more radio phone-ins, and (2) upskill every newsroom that sits on the information super-highway in the country that used to be clever but is becoming increasingly dumbed down.
Are you ready, boots? Start walkin’! Book a free (and fun) consultation to kickstart the convo about how you and your fellow Aussies can eliminate all the common problems so your writing is as impactful as possible, whatever genre or form you’re using. Your readers will thank you!
T: 0401 028 926 | +61 401 028 926
S: LinkedIn – weekly ‘Grammar Guru’ column
Contact details:
T: 0401 028 926 | +61 401 028 926
S: LinkedIn – weekly ‘Grammar Guru’ column
