Remember the first time you heard the phrase ‘think outside the box’? Or ‘blue-sky thinking’? Or ‘paradigm shift’? Once, they were new and exotic. Like words in a foreign language, it was fun to try them out – to use […]

Look at the following sentence: Whether or not he is genuinely gregarious, he is certainly a compulsive communicator who revels in campaigns. It’s taken from a Sunday Times magazine interview with Jeffrey (Lord) Archer, the bestselling novelist/disgraced Tory peer. As […]

Though we can just about get our heads around commas, full stops and hyphens, it’s the apostrophe that trips us up more than any other element of punctuation. As Lynn Truss pointed out in her book Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero […]

Recently, this flyer landed on my mat. It’s for a local gym (I’ve removed their name to avoid embarrassment). My first reaction? It’s a bit tasteless. But even worse, it’s probably likely to alienate half its readership. Don’t think so? […]

Imagine an email to your best friend telling them what you did last weekend. Now imagine a letter to a prospective client telling them why your service means you stand head and shoulders above the competition. What did you imagine? […]