Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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....
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',...
Our newsletter Writing Matters will help you to get your point across, supercharge your writing and make sure you stand out from the crowd. We’ve helped over 80,000 professionals achieve their goals.
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...
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....
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...
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...
Congratulations to all the winners at the MCA Awards Dinner 2012, which was recently held at the Hilton Hotel in Park Lane, London. The Platinum...
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’s less than a month until the CIPD HRD conference (that’s the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development’s annual Human...
Emphasis are proud to be sponsoring the Customer Engagement Award at the MCA Awards 2012. Last year, management consultants Navigant scooped the...
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...
Subscribe via RSS / iTunes | Download | All podcasts 55 minutes Fed up with email? Learn how to ditch it altogether from special guest Luis Suarez....
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...
Get your own PDF copy of The Write Stuff, the definitive guide for everyone who writes at work.