Homonyms are words that are pronounced or spelt in the same way but have different meanings – there and their, for example.

This ten-question quiz will test you on some of the most commonly confused homonyms. How well do you know your allusions from your illusions and your pails from your pales?

After you've answered the questions and been given your score, an explanation of each pair of homonyms will appear. Good luck!

How did you do? Let us know by popping a comment in the box below.

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Click the icon above to hear this interview (36 minutes)

Our guest in this special episode of Communication Lab is Ryan Holiday, who dropped out of college at the age of 19 and went on to become global marketing director of American Apparel while still in his early 20s.

A sometimes secretive figure, he's been behind major publicity coups, including orchestrating a fake smear campaign for one of his own clients - the controversial American author Tucker Max.

With no budget, and in under two weeks, he secured coverage in everything from the Chicago Tribune to the Washington Post. All of which is covered in his new book, Trust me, I'm lying - confessions of a media manipulator.

In this hard-hitting exclusive interview, he reveals why he's finally stepping out from the shadows.

Further reading

The internal league table of page views for each Gawker.com blogger is at www.gawker.com/stats

For more on Ryan, to www.ryanholiday.net

The website for the book itself is here: www.trustmeimlying.com

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35 minutes

How do you approach new business in an era when cold calls rarely reach decision-makers and everyone's on the guard against spam? Guest Bryan Kreuzberger, the founder of Breakthrough Email, shares his formula for writing an email that the recipient will both open and act on.

Plus: how words can rewire your brain, and the power of focus and rapt attention.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links:

Bryan's website is Breakthrough Email, where you can see him talking more about his technique, or you can download his PDF guide here.

The three books mentioned are:

• Words Can Change Your Brain by Andrew Newberg and Mark Robert Waldman

• The Happiness Advantage by Shawn Achor

• Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher.

You can try the selective attention test that Rob refers to, with the basketball, here on YouTube.

And here's the Harvard Business Review article, The Unimportance of Practically Everything.

What did you make of  the podcast?  Are you thinking of trying out Bryan's tips? Share your thoughts in the comment field below, or by tweeting Bryan (@bryankreuz), Rob (@Robert_Ashton), Andy (@doctorpod) and Emphasis (@EmphasisWriting).

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55 minutes

Fed up with email? Learn how to ditch it altogether from special guest Luis Suarez.  He relies almost exclusively on social media for business communication, despite having a senior role in IBM and living in the Canary Islands.

Plus: soon you really will be able to work and walk at the same time, as Google announces a heads-up display for all; and a gun that shuts people up. It’s all in the latest Communication Lab podcast.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

Luis blogs at elsua.net and you can watch the video he mentions at outsidetheinbox.eu.

The three main social media he uses are:

• IBM connections for internal company communications

• Twitter for immediacy

• Google+ for in-depth conversations and brainstorming

Here are some links to the article on Atos chief executive Thierry Breton’s ban on internal email, a piece in The Atlantic on the evolution of email, and a mini-review of Fluent by Lifehacker.

If you too are feeling the iPad love, check out this article on how it is accelerating the move away from printing. And for fun, here are the heads-up glasses and the silencing gun.

We’d love to hear what you thought of Luis’s recommendations about moving away from email. If you decide to adopt any of his practices, why not tweet him (@elsua), Rob (@Robert_Ashton), Andy (@doctorpod) and Emphasis (@EmphasisWriting), using the hashtag #lawwe and let us know how you get on?

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32 minutes

Listen now to the latest programme, featuring linguistics expert Dr Lynne Murphy talking about the differences between UK and US English.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

Check out Lynne's excellent blog Separated by a Common Language (and here's how to spell 'woa/whoa/woah'). You can also follow Lynne on Twitter @lynneguist.

Our post on giraffe bread tells how the tiger changed its stripes.

Rob got five, Lynne got seven – see how well you do in our new dictionary words quiz.

Meet the mucus troopers and the adultescents in Collins' 2004 attempt to create a Living Dictionary.

If you too think that there's a lot to be said for learning a word a day, try following @wordoftheday on Twitter.

Finally, if you'd like to keep track of those pesky Britishisms in American English, see Ben Yagoda's blog Not One-Off Britishisms.

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40 minutes

Listen now to the latest programme, featuring communications expert Sharí Alexander: how to get what you want every time you speak.

Further reading

If you'd like to know more about any of the topics discussed, try these links.

Here are the BBC's article on bionic contact lenses, the Guardian's article on contact lenses containing LEDs and circuits and this release from the University of Washington.

Neurosciencemarketing.com has written about bad adjectives and Futurelab has written a counterpoint: when adjectives can be good.

And here's John Naughton's response to Mark Zuckerberg's remarks about email and PCMag.com's 9 reasons email is dead.

<< Read the January 2012 e-bulletin

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31 minutes

In this podcast, communication strategist David Levin joins Rob Ashton and Andy White to discuss strategies for approaching difficult conversations in the workplace.

Further reading

Did something in particular catch your interest? Here are some links to what we talked about.

Here's Ben Yagoda's article on Slate.com, The Britishism Invasion.

And some Census statistics showing the increase in Welsh speakers between 1991 and 2001.

David mentions having lived with the Zuni people in New Mexico. Here's a page from the community's own website, describing the language, and here's a more analytical one from Omniglot.com.

The book by John Miller, to which David contributed, is QBQ! The Question Behind the Question and here's a video of John in action.

David's own book is Don't Just Talk – Be Heard.

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32 minutes

Rob Ashton and Andy White discuss the secret life of pronouns, proofreading tips and why the Freedom of Information Act may have taken all the excitement out of government communications.

Further reading

Hear something you want to know more about? Here are some useful links.

The Planet Word series with Stephen Fry has now finished, but it's available to buy from Amazon and other bookshops. The episode that Rob was talking about is this one.

Professor James Pennebaker is a social psychologist based at the University of Texas. His book The Secret Life of Pronouns examines how and why pronouns and other forgettable words reveal so much about us.

The tool Rob mentions that analyses your writing is no longer available. But you can test your instincts about pronouns with this quiz and, if you're on Twitter, have your personality analysed via your tweets.

Americans will be familiar with the Gettysburg address, but for any Brits wishing to brush up, Gregory Peck does a good job of reading it in this video.

Here's the letter from the civil servant to the Guardian about the Freedom of Information Act making communication in the public sector 'anodyne, benign and sterile'.

For more tips on proofreading, you might like this post on our blog. And to make sure you never forget to check the headings and furniture, see this collection of newspaper blunders. Finally, test your observational powers with this monkey business: how many times do the players wearing white pass the ball?

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34 minutes

In this series of lively podcasts, Emphasis CEO and former scientist Rob Ashton puts language under the microscope, over a Bunsen burner and quite possibly into one of those things that looks like a high-tech salad spinner. Along with developer Andy White and a series of expert guests, he’ll be looking at the latest research into language, talking to expert guests and offering handy tips on how to make the most of our mother tongue.

In the first programme in the series, Rob and Andy discuss why writing matters more than ever, email pet hates and how to hack any sentence in 60 seconds.

Further reading

Here's the article Rob refers to on the top five most annoying things you can do in an email, together with the results of our Twitter poll. And here's a guide to writing good emails and cutting down on the number of unnecessary messages you receive.