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Posted by: Rob Ashton
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 […]
23 / 10 / 24
Have you ever wondered why you can never seem to get a document written until its deadline is looming? You might have been paralysed by writer’s block for weeks. Yet when you realise it’s due in at 5 o’clock today, you’re miraculously able to get on with it. It’s as if you’ve found a secret […]
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 […]
10 / 10 / 24
A client contacted us recently while still recovering from a mild trauma. He was the head of risk at an investment bank and had just finished reading a report on a major incident in the lending team. The report had rightly flagged the problem in the first two sentences, grabbing his attention in an instant. […]
07 / 10 / 24
If you ever struggle with writing at work, take comfort in knowing that to do it at all should be impossible. In fact, the whole idea of communicating through the written word sounds preposterous when you break it down. If someone were to pitch it as a business idea on Dragons’ Den or Shark Tank, […]
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 […]
23 / 09 / 24
Struggling to write is a universal human experience. We all find it hard to some degree, as I’ve explained before. But if the key word is ‘human’, what about AI? After all, ChatGPT is more powerful than ever (even if it has disappeared from the headlines). And AI assistants seem to be popping up everywhere. […]
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