I find the hardest part about writing blogs is deciding what to write about. But first a confession: I am not a regular blogger because I would rather not blog than write something for the sake of it, and sometimes other things, such as paid work, take priority. How do you decide what to blog […]
What emails do you find hard to write? We all find some emails difficult to write. For instance: I hate following up overdue invoices. I sometimes find it hard to say ‘no’. I wish I never did anything I had to apologise for! I am not always tactful when I give feedback to people on their writing (I […]
Tone is important in emails – the wrong tone can get you into trouble When we’re writing business emails in a hurry, we often forget to check the tone. Sometimes it helps to put the email aside if you’re having difficulty with the tone. Another test is to read your email aloud and see how it […]
Your emails have a better chance of being opened and read if you write specific subject lines that catch people’s attention. Keep your subject line short and specific Use phrases rather than single words because a one-word subject line is seldom informative enough. On the other hand, long subject lines take too long to read […]
A basic catchcry of business-writing articles and training is ‘write for your audience’. Yet what does this mean in practice? I don’t think this is as straightforward as it sounds and I am going to look at this question from my own experience of: Teaching people how to write better board papers Writing my e-newsletter […]
When to use dashes, parentheses and commas We all insert extra information in sentences at times with dashes, parentheses (also known as brackets) or commas. Sometimes it’s just irresistible to include that additional information that we hope will make our meaning clearer or provide context. But does the extra information make our writing harder to […]
Use hyphens to link words for clarity Hyphens glue words together so the reader knows they are linked. Some of the rules for using hyphens are straightforward, but there are several exceptions and often you have to decide whether a hyphen is necessary. That is why some people dislike hyphens and probably why the Oxford University […]
The singular they is now widely accepted The use of the singular ‘they’ to avoid using the generic ‘he’ or alternative usages such as ‘he and she’ or ‘h/she’ is not new and is now widely accepted. (The singular they includes ‘them’ and ‘their’.) ‘The person is entitled to have an alternative address substituted for […]
Several business writers have told me they were taught never to put a comma before ‘and’. Now, I could understand if they’d been told not to put one after ‘and’, but before? So I decided to look at occasions when we can use a comma before ‘and’. There are two occasions where a comma can […]
I wrote a blog in defence of the passive voice because it gets so much bad press. In this blog I want to redress the balance and acknowledge the virtues of the active voice. In case you didn’t read the previous blog, let’s define the active and passive voice. The distinction is based on a […]