Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 website of The Mirror, still stood out: ‘Tragic coronavirus death toll rises by lowest number in seven weeks.’ ...
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...
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...
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Getting someone to read a document is often a bit like pushing a car that won't start. You have to overcome a ton of inertia at first. But it then...
People read your documents until they can stop. Then they do. But that's not because we have limited attention spans. The truth is that we can focus...
One of the biggest business-writing myths has to be that shorter is always better. 'Less is more,' say those who claim to be in the know. Keep it...
Imagine you've just got a text from a friend. Which of these two messages would you react to more strongly? A: 'The forecast doesn't look great...
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...
When you consider the concept of inventions, anything from the wheel to the iPod might spring to mind. You’re probably less likely to think of...
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