Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 writing. It's that the opposite is true. Generative AI apps like ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot can produce text that is often...
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...
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...
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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...
A paper to the board can be incredibly powerful. But you have to tell them what you want and make sure they actually read it.
Organisations are full of documents that don't work. The CEO of a London bank recently told me that he'd spent 20 minutes of his last board meeting...
If you're putting off writing a tricky email or text right now, you're not alone. According to a recent poll by YouGov, almost one in three adults...
Get your business writing noticed with these easy-to-follow tips. Start with the reader in mind Do they know much about the topic? Do they...
We sometimes learn as much from our failures as from our successes – often more so. But if we simply move on and never communicate these...
Compared with pondering the placement of the much less familiar semi-colon or the enigmatic apostrophe, the ubiquitous comma might seem hardly worth...
We might all have certain choice words that we resist saying to our work colleagues or boss at times. But these are probably quite different from...
As the adage goes, anything worth having is worth fighting for. But it can be a rude awakening if you’ve signed onto a nursing degree course...
Sometimes, in a writing skills blog, you'll find yourself in a corner of the punctuation family tree where two symbols seem so suspiciously similar...
If you’ve ever put off DIY, you’ll know that a dripping tap or peeling skirting board eventually just becomes one of life’s...
Finance is a murky place for many people. Money comes into the bank account and it goes out again. And the process in between is something of a...
Good intentions may or may not pave the road to hell, but evidently they can sometimes be wrapped up in some seriously bewildering prose. On its...
University students' writing is plagued by poor grammar and punctuation and a lack of consensus on what constitutes a clear writing style, new...
Developing your writing skills is key if you want to become a recognised industry expert, says Rob Ashton. If you take a poll to find the world’s...
Will you have something you just have to say to the next government of this country? It seems fitting somehow to follow-up our last blog post with a...
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