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...
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...
Ask most scientists, engineers and technologists why they got into the profession and they’re unlikely to say it was because they love...
It's amazing how many good ideas are lost in translation – not from one language to another, but from the brain to the printed page. One...
Whether the message is good, bad or indifferent; now is no time for silence, says Rob Ashton. During the ancient wars, if you wanted to...
For such a tiny punctuation mark, the apostrophe has an enormous tendency to confuse and irritate people. The reaction to this all-too-common...
Expert trainer Kathy Gemmell explains how to use design to create easy to read, high-impact documents. Learn how to: Make a document look readable...
Someone once said that writing is easy. You just sit at your keyboard and wait – till the beads of blood form on your forehead. For anyone who...
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