About

“The rules of grammar are crabbed things to many persons… and I cannot see that anything is learned with greater success than what is learned by playing, and this is, in truth, a harmless fraud, to trick a person into his own profit.”

After reading this quote attributed to Desiderius Erasmus, we knew we had found the title for this site. That’s because A Harmless Fraud aims to help people write better, read better, and maybe even think better by offering learning experiences that feel a lot closer to play than work. Even by dipping into the site for a few minutes during the week–to take a short quiz or read a blog post–you should soon find yourself sidestepping writing pitfalls you previously fell into unawares. But the site also aims to broaden horizons with coverage of writing and culture that is sometimes hard to find in events-led media. As well as quizzes delivered through an intuitive and engaging interface, A Harmless Fraud is characterised by a lively blog presence focused on literature, journalism, and the way language is used–in other words, anything that might conceivably interest our audience.