Catie Holdridge

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...

We’ve been paddling down various creeks for Ban the bull in the past few editions of Write Away, trying to clean up and make sense out of what we’ve found there. From online terms and conditions to action plans; and tenancy agreements to the water cooler: unnecessary...

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...

There’s been another U-turn on the effects of texting on children’s literacy skills. The latest research, conducted by Dr Clare Wood at the British Academy, suggests that, far from damaging their ability to read and write, using ‘textisms’ like...

As more people join us on our crusade to rid the English-speaking world of business writing that doesn’t seem to speak English, we can only become a more powerful force. The extract this month is taken from the website of the Organisation for Economic...

The colon is a common cause of bellyache. The semicolon can leave people dazed and confused. But rather than cutting them completely from your punctuation diet, refer to the following guidelines and you’ll soon find just the right dosage for all your writing...

Remember last year: the pain of putting off that report day after day, finally bashing it out in a blind panic the night before it was due?   Not only does this leave you a stress-addled mess, but it means your cobbled-together work won’t represent the best...