A Warwickshire reader takes us to task over our presentation of last Saturday’s double-page news spread on Madeleine McCann: “What a lovely ad for the M&S Autograph range, so tastefully bordered by a tale of extremely harrowing personal disaster and despair. Shame on you.”

Given that newspapers rely on advertising for their revenue, and that we simply could not afford to run a double-page spread of editorial with no ads in a prime position in the main section, it is hard to envisage a more innocuous ad than this one, which showed four pop stars wearing the latest M&S menswear range. As I wrote in this column a while ago, our night news editors try to be alert constantly to any insensitive juxtaposition of news stories and advertisements, but in the rush of nightly newspaper production it is not always possible to spot difficulties, or to remake pages at the last minute to avoid clashes.

I suspect the complainant simply meant we should have run no advertisement at all next to this story, but that is commercially unrealistic.

The same ad drew a slightly different complaint from another reader that it was “visually invasive”, occupying the centre six columns of the ten-column spread with the story wrapped around its top and sides. The switch from broadsheet to compact continues to present both advertising and editorial designers with an array of creative challenges, and we hope we are meeting them without prejudicing our editorial integrity. Times readers can be relied upon, of course, to keep us informed if they think otherwise.

On a related note, Pauline Thorpe, of Portsmouth, asks: “Why are so many news items illustrated with enormous and often unnecessary photographs, when so much of each page is taken up with advertisements already?

“The latest example of this tendency was the photograph, taking up half the page, in the extract from Katharine Whitehorn’s autobiography (times2, October 5). On September 15 there was a photo measuring 15cm by 17cm of a tray of test tubes, captioned ‘LGC Laboratories go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that police samples are not contaminated with other DNA’. For heaven’s sake, don’t we know what test tubes look like?”

Faced with the enormous proliferation of competing sources of news and entertainment such as PCs and mobile phones, newspapers have had to find ways to meet the challenge. Most have deliberately become much more visual in their appeal, and are now picture-led — these days the maxim is “no picture, no story”, and a picture is probably now worth not one but two thousand words. However, this does occasionally lead picture editors, faced with no obvious illustration to a story, to raid the photo libraries for something relevant and run it bigger than it perhaps deserves.

Peter Harrison e-mails from I know not where, but since he said nice things about the column I don’t mind: “In my days at school (40 years ago) we were taught never to start a sentence with ‘and’ or ‘but’ as these are conjunctions. Both these words are now commonly used in your paper and others to start not only sentences, but also paragraphs. Should I now move on and get a life, or is everyone else wrong apart from me?”

I can do no better than quote the wise Fowler, with whom I entirely concur: “There is a persistent belief that it is improper to begin a sentence with And, but this prohibition has been cheerfully ignored by standard authors from Anglo-Saxon times onwards. An initial And is a useful aid to writers as the narrative continues. The OED provides examples from the C9 to the C19, including one from Shakespeare’s King John. It is also used for other rhetorical purposes, and sometimes just to introduce an improvised afterthought.”

A number of readers have pointed out a schoolboy error: earlier this year we referred to a writer “pedalling ideas”, and now we have written of a community support officer who “peddled away to direct the police” (September 24). Our apologies.

And (see above!) Kate Bexfield, of Hertfordshire, is on a mission to rid the world, or at least The Times, of unnecessary “gots”. She counted 31 one Saturday, including a pullout quote from Jeanette Winterson in Books: “Were I as rich as Bill Gates, I could not have got more happiness”. Well, OK, but just look at that lovely, lovely subjunctive.

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