Catie Holdridge

In our e-bulletin, we like to take a wild specimen of business-writing bull by the horns and tame it, so that it can be understood by all. The Ban the bull campaign was inspired by our gobbledygook amnesty back in 2009, which brought us the following offending...

He began by turning Shakespeare into txt spk. Now it’s Dickens for da yoof of today. Martin Baum, a father from Bournemouth, has rewritten Dickens in ‘yoof-speak’ in order – he claims – to get children interested in reading. ‘Kids...

A delegate on one of our courses suggested a subject for the blog. ‘Can “into” and “in to”,’ she wondered, ‘always be used interchangeably?’ In a word, no. Here’s why. Into ‘Into’ is a preposition. A...

Get your business writing noticed with these easy-to-follow tips. Start with the reader in mind Do they know much about the topic? Do they understand your jargon or acronyms? How important is this information to them? How interested are they in it? (That’s not...

Compared with pondering the placement of the much less familiar semi-colon or the enigmatic apostrophe, the ubiquitous comma might seem hardly worth worrying about. They’re ten a penny, aren't they? Why not just sprinkle them at will or leave them out entirely?...

We might all have certain choice words that we resist saying to our work colleagues or boss at times. But these are probably quite different from the list of taboo workplace words and phrases recently published in Forbes Magazine. The article asserts that phrases like...

Sometimes, in a writing skills blog, you'll find yourself in a corner of the punctuation family tree where two symbols seem so suspiciously similar to each other you could imagine they are basically interchangeable. Enter the dash and hyphen. But wait. These actually...

Good intentions may or may not pave the road to hell, but evidently they can sometimes be wrapped up in some seriously bewildering prose. On its website, the Department of Health outlines its Skilled for Health programme. This aims to make sure people with lower...

Will you have something you just have to say to the next government of this country? It seems fitting somehow to follow-up our last blog post with a quick clarification on how to write to MPs. After all, the wait is nearly over. The campaigning is all but finished. We...

Ever wondered about the etiquette of address in letters? Write Now reader Joanne King asked us for a guide to using salutations and ‘Yours sincerely/faithfully’ for titled individuals, such as service men and women, religious leaders and people who have...

The words ‘obese’ and ‘obesity’ may soon be off-limits at Liverpool City Council. The idea is to avoid causing offence, but will they just end up diluting the message? The proposal, if it goes ahead, would see these words replaced by the term...

A guest blog on the Law Society Gazette's website says that writing pitches is not something that lawyers can afford to skate over. The article, Pitch writing: because it’s worth it, was contributed by Rob Ashton, Emphasis’ chief executive. In it, he looks...