A colleague had a bizarre experience recently. While browsing the website of a well-known electrical-goods company, she idly clicked the Get Help button. But instead of taking her to an FAQ page or opening a live chat as she'd expected, to her horror, the button...
Some rules are made to be broken – even ones that I laid down just a few weeks ago. You know how I said recently that it's usually best to put your main points first? Well, there are some times when that's not such a good idea. Obviously it's still true that few of us...
How much do big words and flowery phrases really impress our peers? A lot less than many people think, it seems. I've talked before about the strange, alternative language that we adopt whenever we sit down to write a document. I call this language Documentese, and...
Have you ever wondered why you can never seem to get a document written until its deadline is looming? You might have been paralysed by writer's block for weeks. Yet when you realise it's due in at 5 o'clock today, you're miraculously able to get on with it. It's as...
I confess that I can be a little paranoid at times. And never more so than when I'm sending important emails. It usually goes something like this. After agonising over the message itself, often rewriting it several times, I hit send and the clock starts ticking. If...
A client contacted us recently while still recovering from a mild trauma. He was the head of risk at an investment bank and had just finished reading a report on a major incident in the lending team. The report had rightly flagged the problem in the first two...
If you ever struggle with writing at work, take comfort in knowing that to do it at all should be impossible. In fact, the whole idea of communicating through the written word sounds preposterous when you break it down. If someone were to pitch it as a business idea...
The strange thing about writer's block is often it's not writing that's the problem at all. It's thinking. 'Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats,' the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman once argued. 'They can do it, but they prefer not to.' (Kahneman was no...
Struggling to write is a universal human experience. We all find it hard to some degree, as I've explained before. But if the key word is 'human', what about AI? After all, ChatGPT is more powerful than ever (even if it has disappeared from the headlines). And AI...
It's tempting to think that writing comes easily to everyone but ourselves. But if we could see inside their heads, we'd probably find that their experience is much closer to ours than we thought. Writing is not a natural process for the human brain. So when humans...
An embarrassing mishap befell me during my recent summer break. It happened when I was searching for the bathroom in an unfamiliar West Country pub. Following several signs had led me to a glass door, which was labelled with what I read as the word 'TOILETS' in large,...
I found myself in a strange situation recently – I was approaching a long Zoom call with genuine excitement. It was a webinar by an expert I'd just started following on social media and I was very keen to hear more of what he had to say. He started well, drawing me in...