Articles on writing, editing, improving content and more

Sometimes people get cranky when you use a noun as a verb, and I can see why. For example, instead of writing: We will make a recommendation about who to hire.

We all make quirky mistakes while writing that we usually don’t notice – and they vary from person to person.

When you see one mistake, you’ll usually find others nearby. I always tell people this in my writing and sub-editing workshops, and yet this observation applies to far more than just proofreading.

If we spoke to our friends the way most people write at work, we wouldn’t have those friends for long. After all, we’d be using bureaucratic words and long-winded phrases that would sound ludicrous if said out loud.

Now that organisations are pumping out more content than ever before across a wide range of mediums and platforms, there’s been a rapid adoption of tone of voice (TOV) guides.

If you want to make your writing more interesting (and if you don't, you're on the wrong website), you need to make it evocative – and a great way to do this is to show, don't tell.

As with speech, your writing needs to flow smoothly and logically. One paragraph needs to lead to another, so the reader can follow your chain of thought.

I once knew an editor who refused to hire someone purely because he didn’t like their use of the serial comma – a punctuation mark so insidious, contentious and divisive that it even goes under several aliases (it's also known as the series, Harvard or, more commonly, the Oxford comma).