Telling someone they need help with their writing rarely lands well. You may be right. They may even agree with you. But they'll still probably feel at least a little wounded if you point it out. The trouble is that, deep down, we think writing is something we should...
One of the biggest dangers of relying on AI writing bots is perhaps not the most obvious. It’s not that what they produce is inferior to human writing. It's that the opposite is true. Generative AI apps like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot can produce text that is often...
Most of us don't like the way we look in photos. We wince slightly when we glance at a picture that includes us. Despite how it might feel, though, this has very little to do with how we actually look. It’s because the face we're seeing is not the face we see in the...
Let's start out with a quick question. Look at the line on the left in the image below. Which one on the right do you think is most similar: A, B or C? It’s pretty obvious that the answer is C, right? Or so you'd think. Yet three out of every four participants...
Much of what we write often sails way over our readers’ heads. The problem is that we take our own knowledge for granted and assume that everyone else knows it too. As I explained recently, we all know more than we think. Even if you're new to a topic yourself, it’s...
The headline almost leapt out of my screen. It was June 2020. Every day was bringing another batch of harrowing news stories. Yet this one, on the website of The Mirror, still stood out: ‘Tragic coronavirus death toll rises by lowest number in seven weeks.’ ...
One of the biggest killers of great ideas (and even greater careers) has to be impostor syndrome. I've met countless professionals who were held back by a lack of confidence in their own knowledge and expertise. It’s almost always unjustified and it always breaks my...
I've got a quick question for you. How many people live in the Australian capital of Sydney? Is it two million? Five million? Seven million? The answer, of course, is none of those. Canberra is the capital of Australia, not Sydney. Well done if you spotted the...
A paper to the board can be incredibly powerful. But you have to tell them what you want and make sure they actually read it.
Organisations are full of documents that don't work. The CEO of a London bank recently told me that he'd spent 20 minutes of his last board meeting arguing over the meaning of a single paragraph in a report. And the board had to get through ten other similar reports...
If you're putting off writing a tricky email or text right now, you're not alone. According to a recent poll by YouGov, almost one in three adults (31%) say they're currently struggling to compose a message or have struggled to recently. And the survey of over 3,000...
Getting someone to read a document is often a bit like pushing a car that won't start. You have to overcome a ton of inertia at first. But it then takes much less effort to keep them moving. You're already halfway there if you can get them to read the first few...