Flow My Thoughts, The IT Professor Said

Style? Quite!

http://www.bbctraining.co.uk/pdfs/newsStyleGuide.pdf

As a Canadian, I am perhaps somewhat more sentitive to national stylistic issues than most of my audience. Here is a tonic guide to style from an authority with oomph -- the BBC itself. Seriously, much of what is written here would be excellent for students to read, and it is very clear and to-the-point -- it is also slyly humourous.

One interesting item in the section on "Americanisms" -- which of course, all true native-speaking Englishmen outside the USA eschew with vigour -- concerns the distinction between "meet" and "meet with", which I do not think an Americanism at all. I tend to use "meet" in terms of contact, as in "I meet a lot of people I know when I walk down the street", and "meet with" in terms of process "I meet with my development staff every week". In the first case, there is no formal meeting, while in the second there is.

Additionally, to say, as I would of this guide, that it "meets with my approval" is surely a defensible colloqualism on a global basis.