The A to Z of Plain Text

Category Archives: A to Z of Plain Text

With one entry for each letter of the alphabet, we share our thoughts, prejudices and advice on best practice in business writing. It’s opinionated, by no means comprehensive and occasionally irreverent. But we hope it will provide a useful occasional reference on topics as diverse as clichés, objectivity and writing for the web.

F – FEATURES AND BENEFITS

By timadmin | Published: November 30, 2009
Sales training courses go to great lengths to ensure that delegates understand the difference between a feature (such as a flat screen for your computer) and a benefit (it takes up less space on you desk). Why is this? A key reason is that much sales literature continually gets [...]
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E – EMAIL NEWSLETTERS

By timadmin | Published: November 30, 2009
Despite spam and information overload, email remains a useful way of communicating. And although we mostly use it as a ‘one-to-one’, personal medium, email is also an ideal vehicle for communicating with large groups. You can update customers, send out news, promote services and sell — all by email. When [...]
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D – DEVELOPING SLANG

By timadmin | Published: November 30, 2009
(Words being considered for the Oxford English Dictionary) According to George W. Bush, “Saddam Hussein has sidestepped, crawfished, wheedled out of any agreement he has made. He’s stiffing the world.” One might not know precisely what the President has in mind when he speaks of crawfishing and stiffing, but most of us could [...]
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C – CLICHÉS

By timadmin | Published: November 30, 2009
Avoid them, unless they’re funny. ‘Pulling out all the stops’ is a cliché. Use it only when referring to organists. As a matter of fact, in our humble opinion, clichés should be consigned to the dustbin once and for all (excuse the irony and quartet of clichés here). Once you’ve fallen [...]
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A – ACTIVE VOICE

By timadmin | Published: November 30, 2009
Too much business writing uses passive verbs. Take a lesson from journalism and liven up your copy with the active voice. The theory can be hard to grasp, but you will know an active sentence when you see one. And it’s usually simple to make passive sentences active. Here’s the grammar background. When [...]
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B – BUSINESS-SPEAK

By timadmin | Published: January 30, 2002
Business-speak, corporate-ese, MBA-speak. Call it what you like, the language of the corporate world rarely makes rewarding reading. Why do businesses say things like: ‘Our mission is to provide innovative solutions that drive value into our customers’ businesses’? Here are several reasons: The truth just doesn’t sound ‘important’ enough — OK, so what you actually do [...]
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