Add Your Suggestions to the Guardian's Interactive Map

Just a brief post before I start moving my desk.

The books section of the Guardian online newspaper is launching an interactive map of the UK's best bookshops and literary locations, and you can add bookshop reviews; while booksellers can add their bookshop to the map, or add a description if it's already listed.

This is a wonderful idea.

If you live in a city or the surrounding suburbs you may not actually know the location of small independent booksellers, and this is an easy way to find out where they are so you can visit them.

Alternatively if you're away from home, it's good to know where you can buy books, especially if you want to avoid the main high street book retailers and support these smaller sellers.

You can look at the map here, and there are links to add information on the page.

I hope there's no rain tomorrow, so I can move boxes outside while the furniture is shifted around indoors. (But the weather map on TV does not look good.)

By the time I write my next blog post I should have my desk and computer moved to it's new position; my reference books and material neatly stacked on a bookshelf close by and not a speck of dust to make me cough...

Is American English Creeping Into Writing by Children ?

Earlier this week Oxford University Press (OUP) revealed the results of their analysis of the 74,074 entries into the Radio 2 (2012) 500 Words Competition, run by the Chris Evans radio show.

Now as a parent whose children are now taking GCSE's, I can confidently say that the way English has been taught in schools has changed quite a bit since they were in the primary classes- emphasis on the preferred reading scheme, regular book reading and spelling tests for words that children were expected to be able to spell by the end of the school year.

So that may explain why one of the results of the OUP's analysis was that; "Children are excellent at spelling the more unusual words (pterodactyl) while there is some confusion over more common words (does and didn’t), and construction of tenses (waked up)."

As lots of adults still have problems with spelling common words (I certainly have a few I always get wrong) and I'm sure we've all heard someone holding a conversation and mixing their tenses up.

 (I think a writer notices these more because the editing side of their brain is always alert to these issues...But not everyone is good at spelling however hard they try.)

And now to the word choices; "American vocabulary (e.g. trash can, sidewalk, candy) featured in the stories especially those written by 10-13 year olds, arguably due to the vogue for US-penned novels such as Twilight and The Hunger Games."

The fact they've ascribed that to books is good in a way, but I think they have ignored another source- children's television programmes. And the 10-13 year olds would have probably had the most long term exposure.

Making high quality children's programmes is expensive, and while there is still some drama based on children's books- Young Dracula for example, generally the number of home-grown productions has declined to be replaced with less costly, bought in programmes from the US - which obviously were made for their own market and would use their own terminology for our bin, pavement and sweets...

This article by the Guardian's education editor, Jeevan Vasagar, also highlights the regional differences in word use, and the differences in writing style between the sexes.
It's well worth reading.

And the really good news is that text-speak is not taking over...