Sometimes, English words are just too confusing. For example, should you write ‘road’ or ‘rode’?

Just because you see something in print it does not automatically make it grammatically correct.

I like to read any publication I come across, for many reasons. One is because I like to observe and absorb as many different styles of writing as I can (there’s more on that subject in the tips you can receive exclusively as part of my nine-week mini-course. You can sign up today – it’s free!).

Another reason is so I can gather more than one angle on the big news stories of the day – to see who is saying what according to whom and then try to read between the lines to work out what I think happened.

I particularly like to read English newspapers of all descriptions: tabloid and broadsheet (for example, The Sun and The Observer) and of various political persuasions.

However, it was in The Sunday Times recently that I had to look again and again at a certain word.

This is what it said:

Ted Simon famously road around the world in 1973. Doing it again, he tells Cosmo Landesman, he found a packed planet growing charmless

Did the sub-editor who wrote that paragraph mean to say that? I don’t know, but perhaps Ted Simon famously rode around the world is what was intended.

So it just goes to show that you can easily and cheaply improve your English by reading a lot and trying to work out if what is written is actually grammatically correct. What you will find is that often it is not.

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