Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 cats,' the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman once argued. 'They can do it, but they prefer not to.' (Kahneman was no...
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...
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...
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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...
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,...
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...
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...
Email is an integral part of our business lives, but it’s also a liability. Sometimes a simple attempt at being brief and concise can make you come...
Split an infinitive and you can be sure someone nearby will start clutching their ears dramatically and berating you. But is it really wrong to...
Management-speak is one of the biggest irritations in modern office life, regularly appearing near the top of surveys on workplace annoyances. What...
Whether you’re setting up a new business venture or trying to get the go-ahead for a project, there’s one essential document you need....
The question of whether to use 'I' or 'me' in sentences such as ‘Doris and I went to the opera’ is one we've covered on the site before. But it...
'That' and 'which' can sometimes be used interchangeably. But it’s not always correct to do so. The general rule is: use ‘that’ to define and use...
We are more likely to remember information when it is written in a hard-to-read font, according to psychologists at Princeton and Indiana...
According to playwright George Bernard Shaw, the UK and the US are ‘two countries divided by a common language’. We may not need translators to...
New research indicates there may be an easy solution to beating writer’s block: forgiving yourself. Leaving writing tasks to the eleventh-hour is...
You probably have something in common with everyone else who’s ever had writer’s block: you eventually got going. The problem is, that may well have...
New research from Kent University’s psychology department confirms what many of us already know from experience. Far from helping us become...
Fear is the underlying emotion behind writer’s block. An inability to start writing hours before deadline may trigger the fight or flight...
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