Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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...
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...
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...
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....
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...
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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...
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...
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',...
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...
The three little innocent-looking dots of an ellipsis (...) probably carry more power to annoy and confuse your readers than any other punctuation...
Repetition isn’t a dirty word. I repeat: repetition isn’t a dirty word. But some of the tricks we use to avoid it are positively vulgar. We’re quite...
In the battle of spaces, no one can hear you scream. The argument about whether to use one space or two after a full stop (aka period) is...
Go prepared to your office parties and family gatherings this year. If the conversation wanes and you’ve already exhausted the Christmas cracker...
When you've just finished slaving over a report, it can be hard to achieve the distance you need to proofread it effectively. Watch Emphasis CEO Rob...
Watch Emphasis CEO Rob Ashton as he transforms a selection of real-life examples from our clients. He shows you how to give your business writing an...
Writer's block used to mean sitting at your desk, staring into the empty void that was your screen and hoping for inspiration. Ah, those were the...
This is a nice, easy one to answer. No sitting on the fence, no ‘it’s down to personal preference’. We won't even need the full minute. Here goes:...
When it comes to calls for improving legal writing, few are made with more authority than this. Lord Neuberger of Abbotsbury, President of the...
Last week, we set our readers a challenge: to shorten a paragraph and tweet it to us at @EmphasisWriting, with the hashtag #EmphasisTest, using...
LinkedIn, that's that online CV thing, right? Well, kind of. But with more than 200 million registered users, 2.8 million company pages and 2.6...
In my previous article for Emphasis, I looked at long and short words and their relative merits, writes Stan Carey. One place where shorter is...
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