Ihavegotalot of sympathy for Mr Rees-Mogg

Poor old Jacob Rees-Mogg has come under a bit of fire for daring to suggest that government officials should write proper.

His rules include banning his staff from using words such as ‘very’, ‘lot’ and ‘got’ when writing to other MPs and members of the public. Mr Rees-Mogg, who was brought into government by the new Prime Minister last week, has also asked staff in his new office to stop using commas after ‘and’ and to refer to organisations in the singular. Now, I know it is not politically correct in some areas these days to expect people to spell correctly or have some basic grasp of grammar but I support him, as you probably suspected I would.

I accept Twitter has developed a strange language of its own with its limited character count (lol). And I will defend anyone’s right to their own expletive-riddled opinions on Facebook, even if they are wrong.

But correct spelling and grammar is essential in official communications if the authors are to avoid misunderstandings.

We have a style sheet for this newspaper (yes, I know it’s hard to believe) which tells us how to write stuff.

Like Rees-Mogg, organisations are singular.

So we write “the council IS going to increase charges” when everyone else blames “THEM”.

Confusingly, we refer to sports teams and rock bands as “they”.

We try not to write ‘got’ because it is a very ugly word and can nearly always be replaced by

‘have’ or ‘had’. And there is no point in writing ‘met with’ when ‘met’ means exactly the same thing.

But I can tell I am preaching to the converted. Those not reading this are watching Love Island. I still flinch when I see a rogue apostrophe to indicate plurals such as apple’s and CD’s.

In this case they indicate the apple or CD owns something.

People should also take more care of their commas. Putting one in the wrong place, or leaving it out, can have deadly consequences, as demonstrated here:

1: A young girl was feeling hungry so she asked: “Can we eat, grandad?”

2: A young girl was feeling hungry so she asked: “Can we eat grandad?”

Salt, anyone?