Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
I faced a slightly awkward moment in a meeting recently. Some consultants were presenting their ideas to me, but I stopped them five seconds into their first slide. It was incredibly complex, and I really wanted to understand it. The trouble was that my mind kept...
A colleague had a bizarre experience recently. While browsing the website of a well-known electrical-goods company, she idly clicked the Get Help...
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....
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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...
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',...
Most students are familiar with that morning-after feeling. But academic life can leave you with another kind of hangover you’ll want to shake off...
For accountants, effective writing skills can be as important as the ability to crunch the numbers. Your professional development and competitive...
For a writing-training company, we run surprisingly few grammar and punctuation courses. To be more precise, we run few courses that focus...
Most of us have felt the limitations of the typical grammar- or spell-check at some point. And who hasn’t stared in bewilderment at one of Word’s...
What is 'singular they'? Singular they is the use of they, their or them (plural pronouns) with a singular antecedent (the word the they, their or...
Compare to is used to describe similarity, while compare with is used for differences as well as similarities. So, for example, while a man may be...
It would be easy to imagine that these words represent an evolution: two words becoming one. In fact, they have distinct meanings. Here’s how...
Do you substitute one thing for another, or with another? Well, you can do both. But they have different meanings. You substitute the new for the...
One of our members of staff recently phoned his GP practice and asked to see a specific doctor. ‘Sorry, he only comes in pro re nata,’...
You may have a vague memory of once being told to use I shall for formal occasions, but is it too formal? Too old-fashioned? Will people point and...
Is it learnt or learned? Spelt or spelled? Dreamt or dreamed? If you’re unsure, you’re in good company. Neither the dictionaries nor the newspapers...
Do you have one of those friends that you love to bits but whose every word should be taken with an enormous bag of salt? Well, that’s basically the...
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