KISS for e-mails

One of the best reminders I’ve seen lately related to keeping e-mails brief and to the point comes from Matthew Stibbe’s “Ten laws for better email copy”: “Imagine…that you were paying by the word.”

People first, not disabilities

There was some back and forth in the Toronto Star last week about outdated language in reference to people with disabilities. A column by Kathy English noted that former Ontario MPP Gary Malkowski, a long-time advocate for those who are deaf, took offence at a Star...

Writing is messy

I loved this line, from Daphne Gray-Grant’s “Power Writing” e-newsletter: “Your brain is not a trained seal designed to perform tricks (such as excellent writing) on demand.” Her point was that “perfectly formed prose”...

Relentless verbing

Ugh. While proofreading Big Company’s newsletter the other day, I saw that the CEO talked about competitors having “offshored” parts of their processes. One of my pet peeves is turning perfectly decent nouns into verbs. “Tasking” a group...