Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 experience is much closer to ours than we thought. Writing is not a natural process for the human brain. So when humans...
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...
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,...
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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...
It’s easy to think of email as an electronic form chatting, but to do so can be dangerous. For instance, you may say something in email that...
In his second article on writing skills for nursing students, Rob Ashton explains what to do when inspiration doesn’t strike. D-Day has...
We probably all know what it’s like to get frustrated over an item of punctuation, but most of us don’t get the chance to pass a law...
We’ve been paddling down various creeks for Ban the bull in the past few editions of Write Away, trying to clean up and make sense out of what we’ve...
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...
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