Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 at least a little wounded if you point it out. The trouble is that, deep down, we think writing is something we should...
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...
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...
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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...
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...
In our e-bulletin, we like to take a wild specimen of business-writing bull by the horns and tame it, so that it can be understood by all. The Ban...
He began by turning Shakespeare into txt spk. Now it’s Dickens for da yoof of today. Martin Baum, a father from Bournemouth, has rewritten...
Browse the business aisles of any bookshop and you’ll find an array of ‘how-to’ titles. Whether you’re hiring or firing,...
A delegate on one of our courses suggested a subject for the blog. ‘Can “into” and “in to”,’ she wondered,...
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...
For anyone graduating – or with offspring who are graduating – this year, you could be forgiven for thinking the future looks a little...
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...
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