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...
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...
Sacré bleu! France has added hashtag to its list of banned English words, writes Cathy Dann. The Académie française, the state body appointed to...
We received the following question from Tim, one of our newsletter readers: ‘Is it okay to write “OK” as “ok”? Or should the abbreviated form always...
Stationary or stationery. One means unmoving, the other means pencils and the like. Ready to pen — er, pin down which is which? Let's get going....
Is your writing feeling a bit flabby and out of shape? Treat it to a one-month detox treatment by following these three rules. Get active The active...
Times are changing for local government. Staff numbers are falling because of budget cuts, the localism agenda means that councils will soon be...
Can you 'speak to' the issues? Hi Emphasis I love the e-bulletin and have a question for you: in US circles, and increasingly in UK contexts too, I...
The basic Twitter.com platform is surprisingly inflexible. For example, it doesn’t allow you to schedule tweets for later, monitor how many people...
[Important editor's note: this post was originally published in December. OK, on we go.] Seasons greetings, Rudolph here. It has come to my...
Is singular they OK? Dear Madam or Sir I have just discovered your excellent website and begun perusing some of your articles. In the one by Jack...
If you were nervous about using Twitter in a professional capacity already, the past month’s headlines about 10,000 tweeters having...
Your CV is the one of the most important documents you will ever create, so it's essential that your writing doesn't let you down, writes Cathy...
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