On misusing or fumbling a word, is it better to hold your hands up to it or to compare yourself to the world’s greatest playwright? For Sarah Palin, apparently, the answer was easy. Her use of the entirely made up ‘refudiate’ was no error; indeed,...

A website is a quick, easy and relatively cheap way to reach thousands of potential clients. Rich web content is what keeps those prospective clients coming back for more. Most people (75 per cent*) say that content quality is the most important factor governing...

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?...

For anyone graduating – or with offspring who are graduating – this year, you could be forgiven for thinking the future looks a little bleak. The average graduate salary is likely to stay frozen at £25,000 for the second year running, according to...

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...

University students' writing is plagued by poor grammar and punctuation and a lack of consensus on what constitutes a clear writing style, new Emphasis research has found. This inaugural research project, which marks the launch of the Emphasis Research Centre,...