I open every course I teach by asking participants what they find most difficult about writing. One of the most common things I hear is a lack of confidence when it comes to writing about topics on which the writer isn’t an expert. How can a marketer write knowledgeably about a complex new financial product? Or how can an HR person write clearly and relevantly about a highly specialist role in IT? (more…)
In his “Manage Your Writing” blog, Kenneth W. Davis is urging people to be more conversational this week. It’s good advice, and writing like you speak is a great way to connect with your readers. So here are seven practical tips on how to develop a more conversational writing style. (more…)
This, from a full-page ad for Hill & Knowlton, who describe themselves as “a leading international communications consultancy”. I spotted it in the “Thought Leader Series” supplement, which came with a recent issue of “PR Week”: (more…)
So Goldman Sachs has announced it’s cutting ten percent of its workforce.
I’m not sure why the media has made such a big deal about this announcement – I was under the impression that the world’s greatest bastion of “meritocracy” has always had regular culls to weed out the “non-performers” and those who were “the wrong cultural fit” (for the latter read: “didn’t buy into the whole Goldman Sachs cult thing”).
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You’d think that no one truly interested in either culture or the arts would use the tautology “cultural arts”. After all, the arts are a part of culture and culture includes a variety arts. Either “culture” or “the arts” will do – and will certainly be more accurate than using the phrase “cultural arts”. (more…)
Occasionally I come up against resistance when I’m evangelising for plain English on one of the courses I teach. And the most common argument people give for refusing to change goes something like this: “But my boss wants me to use fancy words and jargon – it just sounds more professional and I’ll hold myself back if I don’t play the game.”
I’m not convinced that your boss really does like your bad corporatese, but if you believe this to be the case, perhaps you might like to direct your boss to a certain Warren Buffett. (more…)
It’s not enough that you’ve bored me rigid with that overused tailoring metaphor, “bespoke”. By pairing it with “customised”, a word meaning exactly the same, you’re telling me you think I’m too dim to understand what you’re getting at. (more…)
This week’s tautology is a phrase that seems to precede every bulleted list in every corporate document I come across: “include, among (or amongst) others”. (And the 2,444,000 instances of the phrase returned by a quick Google search prove that this tautology is, indeed, rife). (more…)
The title of this post is one of George Orwell’s rules of writing in his much-quoted 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. And it’s a rule that business writers would do well to take more notice of. (more…)
