I’ve got some bad news for you. Here it is: The same qualities that make your emails attractive to your audience are also those that make you look like a s.p.a.m.m.e.r. You’ll agree that s.p.a.m is bad. Irritating all the time, time-stealing some of the time, really dangerous a bit of the time. And, to [...]
You may have heard (from others or from me) that, in business writing, it’s a good idea to break up large blocks of text with bulleted or numbered lists. It makes the writing look less like homework, creates bite-size pieces and gives readers ‘visual breathing room’. Lists are also great because readers are inherently lazy and [...]
65 years ago, George Orwell wrote an essay entitled Politics and the English Language, in which he urged people to write naked. In other words, to keep it clean. Simple. Straightforward. He said, ‘Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to [...]
This is a true story: I have a client in the diary business. They design and manufacture custom diaries for their clients. All sorts. Diaries with hard covers, soft covers, gold leaf. Diaries with inspiration and imagery. And they proof their diaries very carefully before printing. But once, we very nearly let 1 500 diaries go [...]
Email. It’s not rocket science. We’re all pros at it; after all, we send and receive somewhere in the region of 40-80 emails a day, on average. But sometimes we’re not as effective as we could be. Or, we offend. Or, we cause frustration. And frustration, offence or ineffectiveness are not good ingredients when it [...]
