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Posted by: Rob Ashton
10 / 12 / 24
Disappointingly, the good people at the Oxford English Dictionary have chosen not to name Documentese as their 2024 Word of the Year. But as their pick was brain rot, I’m calling that a close second. After all, one definitely leads to the other (or to whatever the corporate equivalent is). In the last 12 months, […]
03 / 12 / 24
There’s one critical problem with most articles and videos on ChatGPT. And it’s glaringly obvious to anyone who works in a sizeable organisation. Not that there’s any shortage of professionals who are now leaning on AI to make writing easier. As each month goes by, more and more people on our training courses are telling […]
27 / 11 / 24
I faced a slightly awkward moment in a meeting recently. Some consultants were presenting their ideas to me, but I stopped them five seconds into their first slide. It was incredibly complex, and I really wanted to understand it. The trouble was that my mind kept being drawn to the separate, verbal commentary their leader […]
05 / 11 / 24
How much do big words and flowery phrases really impress our peers? A lot less than many people think, it seems. I’ve talked before about the strange, alternative language that we adopt whenever we sit down to write a document. I call this language Documentese, and it’s full of long or complex words and phrases […]
22 / 10 / 24
I confess that I can be a little paranoid at times. And never more so than when I’m sending important emails. It usually goes something like this. After agonising over the message itself, often rewriting it several times, I hit send and the clock starts ticking. If I’ve done my job properly, I’ll usually be […]
30 / 09 / 24
The strange thing about writer’s block is often it’s not writing that’s the problem at all. It’s thinking. ‘Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats,’ the late psychologist Daniel Kahneman once argued. ‘They can do it, but they prefer not to.’ (Kahneman was no slouch as a thinker himself. He won a Nobel […]
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