...They risk losing business. (Isn’t that what they say?) One in five consumers think if an item is ‘organic’ it means it is low in fat, while almost one in four had no idea what it meant at all, according to new research from myvouchercodes.co.uk....

Today, it’s exactly two years until the opening ceremony of the Olympics and the moment the eyes of the world turn towards London. However, advertisers not officially associated with the Games will have to duck and dive to be able to cash in on this attention...

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?...

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...