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...
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.
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...
Am I the only one who is taking the decision to ban the ‘i before e’ rule a little too much to heart? It’s been deemed too...
The results are in ... for Britain’s top ten most frequently misspelt words. And the winners are: 1 Definitely (Definately) 2 Sacrilegious...
Which came first: the newspapers or the news? This seemingly silly question – while not quite as mystifying as the whole egg-versus-chicken...
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...
Get your own PDF copy of The Write Stuff, the definitive guide for everyone who writes at work.