Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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. Following several signs had led me to a glass door, which was labelled with what I read as the word 'TOILETS' in large,...
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...
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...
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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...
The headline almost leapt out of my screen. It was June 2020. Every day was bringing another batch of harrowing news stories. Yet this one, on the...
One of the biggest killers of great ideas (and even greater careers) has to be impostor syndrome. I've met countless professionals who were held...
I've got a quick question for you. How many people live in the Australian capital of Sydney? Is it two million? Five million? Seven million? The...
‘However’ is a useful word, however you look at it. [Sorry – Ed.] But readers of our e-bulletin, Write Away, often ask us to clarify the right ways...
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wrappers will no longer bear the long-standing slogan, ‘a glass and a half of full-cream milk’. Instead the...
You may recall that six million people have – through no fault of their own – paid the wrong amount of tax over the last few years,...
There’s a memorable conversation in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice asks the Cheshire cat for directions. Unfortunately,...
People have some pretty strong feelings about the way our language is used and abused if a recent Emphasis blog post is anything to go by. One...
Apple has been awarded a patent in the US for a device to filter out ‘inappropriate’ language from text messages (otherwise known as...
A Write Now reader wrote to us to ask: is it ever acceptable to use the passive voice in 'good writing'? It’s a good question. You may be surprised...
Cadbury’s Dairy Milk wrappers will no longer bear the long-standing slogan, ‘a glass and a half of full-cream milk’. Instead the...
It probably won’t surprise you to find out that we’re pretty keen on the English language here at Emphasis. And we like to know that...
Recent eyetracker research reveals that users of news websites look at the headlines first, rather than the images. The study, called Eyetrack III,...
English can be a confusing language. Swapping one word for another that sounds exactly the same (a homophone) can alter the meaning completely....
The next edition of The Oxford English Dictionary probably won’t appear in print, according to the Oxford University Press (OUP), the dictionary’s...
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