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...
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.
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...
It’s not always true that your readers will want to read everything you’ve written – particularly if it’s a 300-page document. Even if you’ve done...
It’s always a great feeling of revelation (not to mention vindication) when something you have long suspected or known to be true suddenly...
Most people have felt the curse of the dreaded writer’s block: that plummeting feeling of panic that takes hold as you stare hopelessly at a...
It’s not always true that your readers will want to read everything you’ve written – particularly if it’s a 300 page...
When the naturalist Charles Darwin outlined natural selection, he almost certainly didn’t have business people in mind. But his idea, that the...
Lots of people find the difference between a metaphor, a simile and an analogy a tad confusing. But there’s no need to get your undergarments...
According to children’s literacy website Reading Rockets, when kids start to read, they like to mirror the writing they see around them. So, if they...
Are you struggling to come up with a new nugget of corporate gobbledegook? Could your report benefit from some indecipherable doublespeak? Are you...
If you watched the recent Horizon programme on BBC Two – 31 March at 9pm to be precise – you can’t have failed to have been moved...
Writer, broadcaster, politician and chef: Clement Freud never ran short of ways to fill his time. This was true until the very end. He died at his...
He’s a shrewd one, that Sir Alan Sugar. As he announced in the opening episode of The Apprentice, he realises that knowing every word...
We should all be eating more pollack, for cod’s sake. So say the environmentalists trying to save the perennial partner to chips from an...
Get your own PDF copy of The Write Stuff, the definitive guide for everyone who writes at work.