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Posted by: Catie Holdridge
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 […]
Posted by: Rob Ashton
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: Jacob Funnell
26 / 04 / 16
You don’t have to work in a zoo, the circus or pest control to come face to face with a wild beast at work. Sometimes they’re found lurking in our writing. Sounds strange? Well, an out-of-control sentence can be a terrifying thing. Take this monster, based on a real-life example: I have attached a document […]
05 / 04 / 16
Sometimes we can’t remember why we do things a certain way. This is certainly the case with company reports and other documents. It may not always be the best way – far from it – but that’s the way they’re written and that’s that. ‘We must always start with two pages of background,’ explains a […]
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: Cathy Dann
29 / 07 / 14
Recently, we were asked to settle a dispute between colleagues over the word that. The example given was: ‘The consensus was the chief executive was right’ vs ‘The consensus was that the chief executive was right’. Our correspondent had written the former, but his colleague had insisted on the latter. Which do you think is […]
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