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Choose your words wisely
Posted by: Rob Ashton
05 / 07 / 16
There aren’t many corporate CEOs who put improving writing skills at the top of their action list. In fact, I’ve never heard of a single one who stood up at a shareholders’ meeting and said, ‘We’re going to invest in improving how our people communicate in their reports and email, because it’s critical to our […]
Posted by: Catie Holdridge
30 / 06 / 16
How can you make your writing engaging? Or, more specifically, how can you make your business writing engaging? Why, surely that’s a contradiction in terms! Right …? A lot of people do seem to make a distinction between 1) Work Writing, and 2) Pretty Much Every Other Kind of Writing. It essentially amounts to this: […]
20 / 06 / 16
Cowardly writing is the linguistic equivalent of your unreliable ex. It avoids committing. It leads you astray. It wastes your time. And it evades all entreaties to be straightforward or say what it really thinks. You can recognise it by its long sentences, convoluted structure and overuse of words and phrases such as ‘clearly’, ‘it […]
11 / 05 / 16
One of the great pleasures of my job is that I frequently get a chance to talk to people who really are at the top of their game. Over the last 18 years, my colleagues and I have worked with over 40,000 people. And among them have been many industry leaders who have built seriously […]
Posted by: Simon Busch
31 / 03 / 16
What’s the right tone to strike in business writing? Formal? Yes, you want to come across as a serious contributor to the subject at hand and not to sound too … chatty? Hmmm. But if you’re too serious, don’t you risk boring people and losing them? Tone is a minefield. And it’s made all the […]
Posted by: Richard Smyth
18 / 03 / 14
Repetition isn’t a dirty word. I repeat: repetition isn’t a dirty word. But some of the tricks we use to avoid it are positively vulgar. We’re quite happy, it seems, to repeat ourselves when our intention is rhetorical – when our priority is emphasis, emphasis, emphasis. And yet when repetition is required for the purpose […]
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