Is this a situation that’s familiar to you? It’s 9am. You’ve just sat down at your desk. You’ve got 30 minutes before your first meeting of the day and decide to quickly deal with your emails. You open the first message. It’s from a colleague and your heart sinks. It rambles, it witters, it’s incoherent […].. Read More
The ability to write words that persuade, sell, encourage, inform, inspire or whatever else it is you need them to do. The ability to get to the heart of what you want to achieve and come up with the message that will help you achieve it. The ability to bring creativity and ingenuity when it’s […].. Read More
I love words It’s quite hard to get over how much I love words and how much I need them in my environment. I can quite happily spend several hours in an art gallery reading the captions to the paintings before realising that I haven’t actually looked at any of the paintings. I’m always looking […].. Read More
As part of the talk I’ve been preparing for the University of Gloucestershire’s Creating Futures event, I’ve been thinking about the skills I think you need to have if you’re going to make a success of running your own business. As part of this, I’ve been thinking about pricing and how to price your work […].. Read More
On Wednesday 21 March I’ll be speaking at Ledbury’s Women in Rural Enterprise March meeting and sharing five tips on writing more effective marketing materials. If you’d like to come along (sorry, it’s women only!), you can book a place on Eventbrite... Read More
According to Aristotle, if you want someone to be persuaded by your argument, logic is less important than whether they like and trust you. I’d love to say I learned this reading Aristotle but in fact it was from listening to an interview on the Today programme last week with Jay Heinrichs. He was promoting […].. Read More
On Tuesday 20 March I’ve been invited to speak at Creating Futures, an event organised by the University of Gloucestershire. It’s an event focused on the schools of Liberal and Performing Arts that aims to inspire second year students with ways in which they can put their writing skills to good use and consider the opportunity to become self-employed […].. Read More
I opened the March edition of my BBC Good Food magazine and was immediately wowed by this ad for Green & Black’s ice cream. It’s perfect – it’s perfectly pitched at its target audience, it’s perfectly pitched to encapsulate Green & Black’s luxuriousness and indulgence and it’s got a perfectly pitched touch of humour. Hats off to […].. Read More
There are two types of writing in the world: writing that’s a pleasure to read and writing that’s a chore. Writing that zips along and writing that makes you want to go zzzzzzz…. No matter what it is you’re writing, you want it to be a pleasure to read. Because the more enjoyable it is […].. Read More
There’s a very quick test you can carry out to find out whether your marketing copy is likely to appeal to your readers. Count the number of times you say ‘you’ (or its variations) and how many times you say ‘we’ or ‘I’ (or their variations). You should be saying ‘you’ far more often than […].. Read More