Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 started following on social media and I was very keen to hear more of what he had to say. He started well, drawing me in...
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...
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...
Our newsletter Writing Matters will help you to get your point across, supercharge your writing and make sure you stand out from the crowd. We’ve helped over 80,000 professionals achieve their goals.
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...
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.
Write Now reader Simon Lewis joins the great 'that' debate: Definitely one of my bugbears, that. Take this example: “The teaching medical...
When you’re lost in a foreign country or an unfamiliar city, there’s a good chance that someone will give you incomplete directions. They’ll...
The most innocuous-seeming topics have sparked incredibly heated debates. Marmite: love it or loathe it? Toilet roll facing front or facing back?...
After the resounding success of our gobbledygook amnesty, we realise there are obviously many concerned citizens out there who share the desire to...
When most people think of Leonardo da Vinci, they think of him as the artist who painted The Mona Lisa and The Last Supper. But da Vinci was also an...
As the seasons turn and the nights draw in, we continue to track how often the terms 'recovery' and 'green shoots' appear in the broadsheets. And we...
There’s usually one guest at a party with a perennial case of ‘it’s all me, me, me.’ This is the type of male or female who...
It is 40 years ago, almost to the day, that the internet made its first connection. On 29 October 1969, a computer in the University of California...
A new dictionary is set to make sense of that most inscrutable of languages: teen speak. This comprehensive reference book, called Pimp Your Vocab,...
You may remember that, back in July, we threw down a gobbledygook gauntlet, by calling an amnesty on business double-speak and offering a prize for...
The latest version of the Collins English Dictionary has just been published, with some interesting new additions, including ‘iPlayer,...
Many professionals may need to use creative or lateral thinking in their work, but here’s a competition that invites anyone to do just that...
Get your own PDF copy of The Write Stuff, the definitive guide for everyone who writes at work.