Newspaper headline writers are the masters of the pun, regularly coming out with classics. In fact you only realise just how clever they are when you try and write something with sparkling wit and humour as there is a fine line between funny and tasteless.

For those of you who don’t know what a pun is, it’s a play on words which are alike or virtually alike in sound but totally different in meaning.

One of the best examples was from The Sun newspaper, reporting on the attempted diamond heist at the ill-fated Millennium Dome. The front page headline read: “We only came for De Beers”

Another favourite of mine was ‘Smoke on Trent’ which was a tabloid headline on smokers in the city of Stoke on Trent who flouted the ban when it started in summer 2007.

I have to title a lot of the copy I write for clients, particularly for newsletters or blogs. Sometimes the headline writes itself because it jumps out of the content but quite often I find myself with a choice - dull or cringe worthy. Finding the right balance between the two is a definite challenge.

Some of the funniest puns are unintentional and they tend to be either rude or humorous in a ‘graveyard humour’ way like these gems that I found after a quick scan of the internet:

MPs to Take a Close Look at Pornography

Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says.

Often a pun can be resolved by some strategic punctuation (not so helpful in headlines) or simply by reading what you have written out loud. Personally I think there’s always room for a good pun provided your subject matter is not sensitive. You will probably find that the puns you write are quite average, but then I could just be mean.

Sometimes you may have all the information you need to tackle a certain task or situation but the brain cannot be trusted to take in every detail and when it spots a gap, that’s when we are more likely to fill it in with so-called logical thought which, for me, can veer from the mundane to the ridiculous.

Writers often find reading and proofreading their own work very difficult. There is a tendency to scan rather than read things properly which leads to basic errors. I frequently pass my work to a third person to read through before I submit it because I know the project so well that my brain sometimes skips over what my eyes are reading. A third person will also spot the spelling mistakes and errors that the computer is pre-programmed to miss. Popular ones are for and fro or from and form; any words that are incorrect in the sentence but spelt correctly (another thing on my long list of reasons to mistrust the computer grammar checker).

It is scary how quickly these typing errors can become ingrained. Working in the North of England, I went through a phase when one letter out on the keyboard at the end of Yorkshire gave the region a whole new (and not complementary) spin. My only tried and tested method is to follow each word with a pen to make sure I don’t miss anything when proofreading but even that is not totally fool proof.

How we read is an important element of how we write. I read very quickly and that can get me in a pickle when it comes to proofreading. Hopefully, the more I write the more I am learning my lesson and there is nothing like having a glaring error pointed out to remind you of the importance of taking your time to look at the content, tone and style of written communications in all their forms.

And, if all else fails don’t fall back on assumptions because, as my teacher used to say with annoying rightness, “Assume makes an ass of u and me.”

Getting in there is no mean feat - the OED employs around 50 readers who spend their days scouring the pages of contemporary, printed materials including songs, newspapers, novels, scripts and magazines, and noting down any new words they come accross to monitor their frequency.

Just because a word gets used a few times doesn’t mean it gets into the dictionary. On average, it will be looked at over five years to see if it is a long standing word or if it fades swiftly into popular culture and only then will it be deemed worthy of inclusion.

Once a word is in, it is not guarateed to stay in the dictionary forever. In fact there are many words which are fading into obscurity and could be lost forever as they no longer commonly used in popular culture.

The Grandiloquent Dictionary by C.S Bird is a collection of the most obsure and rare of these endangered English words, many of which deserve a reboot (to use a work from the modern lexicon). It a joyful celebration of our linguistic past though it’s hard to imagine many of these words slipping back into the vernacular.

It is also an education in how one word can be used to descibe so much, like the smell of cooking meat or a phobia of bald people. In fact there are 2700 words in total that were once as commonly used as ‘chav’ and ‘email’. I am beginning to sound like a bit of a philosophaster so I will stop being a dringle and a dowfart and shut up.

Surely, there is no real reason for these words to die completely. Go online and find a copy of the Grandiloquent Dictionary and see if you can fit just one word into a conversation or something you write today. You never know, it might make it under the eagle eyes of a OED reader and back into the public favour.

Ask me to memorise and recite a sentence and I would be fine but with spelling you could be asked to spell a word forwards or backwards. In those five seconds my mind would go blank and I would stutter my letters and almost always sit down cursing myself for crumbling under the pressure of sequential letters.

My main issue is that I am not very good at spelling out loud. Even now when I consider myself fairly adept at the construction of words, I have to write them down for them to seem real to me. There are anomalies too when I write a word down (usually one I use all the time) and it just doesn’t look right. I then have to scribble down a few incorrect versions to convince myself that it is indeed the right way to spell it.

While Chrysanthemum was the terror word of my youth, nowadays it is auckward or is that ackward or even awkward. Even spelled correctly this word seems wrong. It is clunky and phonetically harsh and I am unable to tackle it without technological back up. I have employed a tactic of general avoidance but I need to face up to my fears and am trying to use it as much as possible to drill that frustrating spelling into my mind in case I am ever forced to write it down by hand without even the Oxford dictionary (and judging by my rubbish spelling attempts it would take me some time to even find it).

I am pleased to see from the little people in my life that spelling is still going strong in schools and kids are still sent home with their little packs of words to remember and read out. Despite my unpleasant memories of spelling tests, it did give me the desire to master the English language and spread a wide net of vocabulary and I always like to learn new words and revive old ones that have gone out of favour.

Vocabulary is a bonus of spelling and can still be interesting and exciting at any age. So long as you know what the words mean, otherwise it can sometimes be awkward.

In general, a lot of writers, myself included, are more reliant on technology to quality assure their work than using old fashioned, page turning methods. There is one area where I believe the computer tools have proved to be below par at best - The Thesaurus. Microsoft Word is my word processing package of choice but it only offers up a basic selection of words which just don’t provide me with the inspiration I’m looking for and often lead off on an irrelevant tangent.

I always say that to do my job well I need three basic tools: a quiet space, a laptop and Roget’s Thesaurus.

Thesaurus means ‘treasure chest’ in Greek and the large book on my desk features over 300,000 words organised according to meanings, ideas and themes which allow a natural flow through hundreds of words you may never have considered when you are searching for the perfect one to light up your copy. It was first published in 1852 by Dr Peter Mark Roget, a scientist who spent 40 years writing down useful words in his notebook and started the mammoth task of ordering them when he retired.

It is a gold mine of information for any writer who is trying to find a burst of creativity, avoid repetition or even just to increase their vocabulary. Of course, you can go online and find a wealth of information including a vast and accurate Thesaurus but to me it’s just not the same. Not a day goes by when I don’t pick up the weighty tome on my desk and leaf through the 1232 pages for some inspiration.

Though we have all the information we need at our fingertips, I will always love the simplicity of reference books - the light flick of the page and the weight of the volume in my hands. There is nothing like a huge Thesaurus to bring home the true power of the printed word.