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...
Back in January, we lamented that the UK was sitting on a glut of unwanted Christmas presents. Matching present to person is seldom an easy task. It...
Medical technologies may cross language barriers, but words are the building blocks of a marketing message. Rob Ashton of Emphasis explains how...
More people are unsure of their punctuation than would ever care to admit it. Use our quick guide to make sure you're not one of them. Never use...
If you need to win an audience over, lend top speech-writer Jack Elliott your ears, as he reveals his secrets of writing a good speech. In this...
You might have heard it's a good idea to favour the active voice in your writing – it's generally tighter and more dynamic than using the passive...
When is it right to use may and when to use might? Opinions vary, depending on what you read. Here are a few guidelines culled from the Economist...
Being a capable wordsmith may not be what you signed up for. But clinical nurses are spending more and more of their working day on writing tasks....
People power counts for a lot in writing. ‘One in a hundred people’ is likely to produce a much bigger reaction from readers of your...
Almost a month into the first year of the new decade and the time may have come to pick a side: is it ‘twenty-ten’ or ‘two...
It’s the start of the new year and the UK is sitting on a glut of unwanted Christmas presents. Matching present to person is seldom an easy...
There’s been another U-turn on the effects of texting on children’s literacy skills. The latest research, conducted by Dr Clare Wood at...
As more people join us on our crusade to rid the English-speaking world of business writing that doesn’t seem to speak English, we can only...
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