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...

PowerPoint has revolutionised presentations. But too many people now use it as a substitute for thinking. They launch the application before they’ve even considered what they want to say or what information will help the audience take in what they're saying. Too...

Poor literacy at work is still a major problem, new research has found. The report, Literacy: State of the Nation, examined the UK’s literacy levels both in schools and in the workplace. While a quarter of young people see no connection between reading and...

It’s easy to think of email as an electronic form chatting, but to do so can be dangerous. For instance, you may say something in email that you would never put in a letter. Yet in law they may amount to the same thing. At the very least, email has a permanence...

We probably all know what it’s like to get frustrated over an item of punctuation, but most of us don’t get the chance to pass a law banning it. In France, they’ve done just that. Hyphens are notoriously tricky to put in their place. For the last six...

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...

You might have heard it's a good idea to favour the active voice in your writing – it's generally tighter and more dynamic than using the passive voice. But what exactly do we mean by 'active' and 'passive' anyway? The active voice puts the 'doer' of the action...

Almost a month into the first year of the new decade and the time may have come to pick a side: is it ‘twenty-ten’ or ‘two thousand and ten’? Most people seem to be automatically going with the latter, but they are wrong to do so, claims one...