This is the companion piece to the 'There Are No Killer Writing Tips' article, so make sure you've read that before reading this post. So with that taken care of, here is a brief list of common mistakes made when creating content. Don't ever use the passive voice unless you understand why...

Writing for electronic direct mail (EDM)  is difficult for two reasons. Firstly, your copy is jostling for an audience in a crowded marketplace. More specifically, within a crowded inbox. Let's face it, your reader will almost certainly rather be reading some juicy office-based...

I'm always suspicious when I read headlines like 'Killer Writing Tips', as there's an implication that creating good copy is simply a matter of following a set of instructions. Like all skills, there aren’t any shortcuts to becoming a good writer. Most of us only get better at writing by...

... featuring troublesome words, quirks and linguistic anomalies. More important than the actual term used (for example, one could argue the merits of email vs e-mail all day) is the need to use terms consistently within an organisation. So with that caveat, here's my preferred list of...

The boundaries between print and online copy are blurring. Five years ago, when writing for the web, content producers would be encouraged to include plenty of white space, lots of bullets, and small 'chunks' of content. The perceived wisdom was that nobody wanted to read large articles online;...

Fortunately, the days of black hat optimisation are numbered; Google is now very good at recognising web sites that use unethical means to artificially increase their search ranking. The good news for content producers is that writing content for humans (rather than for search engines) is now...

I thought I'd introduce this online style guide by asking the big question up front. In these days of texting, tweeting, blogging and social media, why bother investing in professional communications? Well, good writing adds to the overall credibility of our offerings. Put another way: how...

My ten top tips to remember when creating case studies.   Write a nutgraph (or the 'in-a-nutshell paragraph') for your case study. This is a single paragraph that conveys the essence of the story. This is vital because if...

Overly formal corporate communications (complete with marketing buzzwords and archaic diagrams explaining the company strategy) have been unfit for purpose for a long time. It didn't take the Social Media (SM) phenomenon to expose this as lazy, un-imaginative writing, but what SM has done is...