I recently edited a letter from a company to a government department that was so convoluted I needed a compass, a head lamp and a Sherpa to get through it. You can be professional and respectful of people you need to schmooze without resorting to verbal acrobatics. Here are some examples: “Please allow us to
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I have a violent allergy to the “We’ll get it to you by close of business on Friday; please deliver first thing on Monday” attitude. And as a self-employed contractor, I come up against this often. There’s often an expectation – and it’s overtly expressed sometimes – that you must be so grateful for every
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T’s and C’s apply, right? Nope, they don’t – the apostrophes are incorrect. Adding a plural to an acronym is quite simple – you just add an S as you would to anything else. After all, you wouldn’t write “term’s and condition’s” – and if you would, stop it at once! It’s simple: Ts and
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When planning your content, take a note from magazine editorial teams, who plan their monthly features several months in advance. Magazines have an editorial diary that provides a kind of roadmap of what each issue contains, but the key to this roadmap is that it’s subject to detours. In other words – things change. The
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Producing content to market your business can be exhausting – you’re constantly having to come up with new ideas to say the same thing, essentially, and there’s never any end in sight. Here are some questions to ask yourself if you’re stuck in a content rut, and not getting the engagement you want. 1. Could
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It’s 4.53pm on the day before a public holiday. I get a call from the HR person at a prospective client. They want two things from me: an exploratory meeting with some of their senior managers on the public holiday, and a copy of my CV. I point out that it’s a public holiday, and
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I’m no design expert, but I do know about reading – and about people. And I know that we read more than we’ve ever been expected to read, and that most of us are overloaded with content – from social media, outdoor advertising, lamp poles, the cereal box. It seems impossible to escape. Which is
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If I could give you just one tip to improve your day-to-day writing, it would be this: give yourself permission to write badly. Bad writing, you see, can be fixed. That’s how we get to good writing – we write badly, and then we craft it till it’s good. A blank page, however, is no
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“The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.” Those words by Michelangelo have always resonated with me, because great writing is as much about what you leave out as it is about what you keep. It’s
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I spend a good part of my time training business people to write. But by far the most rewarding part of my job is working with leaders in the C-suite to polish their written communication. As leaders, executives are tasked with influencing, inspiring and rallying their teams. Their ability to do this depends on their
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