Welcome to the blog – advice, opinions and musings on how to make words work
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 answer, of course, is none of those. Canberra is the capital of Australia, not Sydney. Well done if you spotted 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...
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...
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.
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...
Have you ever written what you thought was a perfectly clear email, only to get a reply ten minutes later that left you scratching your head?...
Have you ever missed an obvious typo and wondered how? Maybe it was even in a title in bold, 24-point type. Or perhaps you overlooked a howler in a...
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...
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...
Get your own PDF copy of The Write Stuff, the definitive guide for everyone who writes at work.