In my last post, I listed five of my top tips for clear communication. My favourite, by far, is the one urging writers to avoid overusing nouns. It’s my favourite because this crime against clarity is the feature of bad corporatese that I come across most often – and it’s easy to fix if you know how. (more…)
I’m worried that the word ‘after’ will soon be extinct. I don’t know if it’s that writers have suddenly developed a mistrust of the word – or if I’ve just become attuned to their increasing preference for the cumbersome ‘following’. (more…)
I thought it was just me. Every time I heard the word ‘regarding’ I cringed inside. It just sounded so affected. What was so wrong with the simple, Anglo-Saxon ‘about’?
It also made me think of snooty secretaries screening their bosses with the kind of fierce loyalty one usually associates with (more…)
It’s a bit of a grumpy-old-man truism that Anglo-Saxon economies are doomed because we don’t actually make anything any more. While those hard working Chinese have been assembling ipods to slake the rest of the world’s thirst for stuff, we westerners have (more…)
