Yesterday Pam Ford of Better by Design said to me with a glow on her face, "Plain English makes me happy." Me too! New Scientist readers report being "Jinxed by jargon" this week. Read EURALERT's impenetrable text on the Feedback...
Blog: Content writing and content strategy insights
What's your setup for writing?
  Excuses excuses! I just couldn't get back into the book I was writing. For some reason I couldn't bear to work on it at my usual workstation. And this seemed ridiculous. Embarrassing. Hypocritical. A sign of moral weakness. You...
Search engines are only as good as the content
Beagles are the search engines of the airport. Unlike Google, they sniff out the bad stuff, like drugs and explosives. "Google is good but it's not God" says Gerry McGovern. He reminds us of the old cultists who cried in...
100 banned words cause an uproar
In Britain, the Local Government Association published a list of 100 words that public bodies should not use if they want to communicate effectively. That was on National Plain English Day, 11 December 2007. (I know, I'm slow but I...
Spamming your own staff
Jane McConnell comments (March 06, 2008) on a deeply embarrassing feature of corporate communications. Lately she has been hearing about a rise in unwanted internal emails. Anecdotal, but JMC is an astute trend-spotter. She says: 'a few months ago, it...