If you're feeling generous and you're offering money off something, is that a discount on or discount off the usual price? This was recently the subject of much heated debate here at Emphasis HQ. Sides were taken, teeth bared and battle lines drawn, with both sides...
What's one thing you can do to transform everything you write at work? In fact, not just what you write: what your colleagues write too – even everyone in your entire organisation. Better still, as well as improving the emails, reports, letters, proposals and other...
The active voice gets a hero's welcome from most writing guides, which tend to demonise the passive voice as the root of all grammatical evil. Yet the passive voice does have its defenders, who accuse the first group of oversimplifying matters. Generally, the active...
How can you make your writing engaging? Or, more specifically, how can you make your business writing engaging? Why, surely that's a contradiction in terms! Right …? A lot of people do seem to make a distinction between 1) Work Writing, and 2) Pretty Much Every Other...
Cowardly writing is the linguistic equivalent of your unreliable ex. It avoids committing. It leads you astray. It wastes your time. And it evades all entreaties to be straightforward or say what it really thinks. You can recognise it by its long sentences, convoluted...
Some documents succeed or fail based on how well they get key points across in the shortest time possible. If you need to write a document like this, you must remember one crucial detail. A detail that people don't necessarily like to talk about. Here it is: Your...
Bullet points can be a very useful addition to your documents. They can make it easy for your reader to quickly take in important information or instructions. But once you have your bullet list, how should you punctuate it? Should you use capital letters? Are...
Putting people at the centre of everything you write is critical to the success of your documents and emails. (At least, it is if you want people to actually read what you write.) But what does that mean in practice, when it comes to the words and sentences you write?...
There are some words that can just drag your writing down. They're heavy and dull, and they have a nasty habit of lugging even more weight in with them. They make the person reading your writing work way too hard to understand your meaning. And, the fact is,...
No-one ever said writing documents was easy. If you're like a lot of people, the idea of having to put your own words to paper (or computer screen) makes you want to run and hide in the stationery cupboard. But consider this: it might not be your writing skills that...
In case you've missed it, there's an election looming large here in the UK. But did the parties just throw away their opportunity to write manifestos that would win our hearts, minds and votes? If you've been on one of our courses, you'll know that detailed document...
How do you vanquish writer’s block? Some say to just start writing, even if you later have to delete half of what you’ve written. Some say to begin with the middle and add the introduction and conclusion later. Some say to make a list. We say: grab some paper and a...