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“…of no importance as long as we make our meaning plain” George Orwell You could achieve grammatical perfection and produce a piece of work of dubious clarity. Churchill concurred with Orwell. Commenting on a cabinet paper in which the author had tortuously avoided ending a sentence with a preposition, he noted in the margin: “This […]

Sales training courses go to great lengths to ensure that delegates understand the difference between a feature (such as a flat screen for your computer) and a benefit (it takes up less space on you desk). Why is this? A key reason is that much sales literature continually gets it wrong. How often do you […]

Despite spam and information overload, email remains a useful way of communicating. And although we mostly use it as a ‘one-to-one’, personal medium, email is also an ideal vehicle for communicating with large groups. You can update customers, send out news, promote services and sell — all by email. When it’s used to communicate between […]

(Words being considered for the Oxford English Dictionary) According to George W. Bush, “Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he has made. He’s stiffing the world.” One might not know precisely what the President has in mind when he speaks of crawfishing and stiffing, but most of us could hazard a […]

Avoid them, unless they’re funny. ‘Pulling out all the stops’ is a cliché. Use it only when referring to organists. As a matter of fact, in our humble opinion, clichés should be consigned to the dustbin once and for all (excuse the irony and quartet of clichés here). Once you’ve fallen into the habit (oops) […]

Too much business writing uses passive verbs. Take a lesson from journalism and liven up your copy with the active voice. The theory can be hard to grasp, but you will know an active sentence when you see one. And it’s usually simple to make passive sentences active. Here’s the grammar background. When a sentence […]