“Thanks for having me!”
I am a regular guest on podcasts, webinars and blogs. Below is a selection. If you’d like me to contribute to any of your channels, please get in touch (contact below).
Communicating COVID-19 do’s and don’ts: what we can learn (and unlearn) from H&S
As more people return to the workplace, internal communicators will no doubt be working to inform and remind people of safe and hygienic work practices. I hope we do this without repeating many of the mistakes from most communications around health and safety (H&S). If you work in employee communications, you’ve probably had to work […]
“Build it and they will come”
A hopeful metaphor for traditional corporate content I still occasionally hear someone say, “Build it and they will come.” Wikipedia says it’s a misquote from the 1989 movie Field of Dreams. It says the actual words are from a voice in the head of hero Ray Kinsella, which told him several times, “If you build […]
Can intranets speak what users want?
It’s still relatively rare to find websites where users can choose the language, and those that offer it tend to be from large, global, commercial organizations. Yet even for the few that offer this option still artificially reduce the world. In the US, you might see English and Spanish as options, despite a consumer base […]
Where you end up is where to start
When I’m asked to edit something longer than a few paragraphs from someone who doesn’t write for a living, I can almost guarantee that the concluding sentence should be the lead. The lead is the intro to a piece of journalistic writing. It’s sometimes spelled ‘lede’ (but that seems to be from an era when […]
Don’t leave your writers hanging
One type of difficult client is the one who can never be pinned down on what they want to say. In the same category is the subject matter expert who claims to be so busy that there’s no time to brief the writer. Instead, they send you two endless PowerPoint presentations that are so text […]
“Seen any mistakes lately?”
I used to teach evening writing classes, and my students knew that I had a day job in corporate communications. Sometimes they’d ask, ‘What mistake do you see most often?’ Most of them worked in corporate settings too, and some lacked confidence in their writing. My sense was that they wanted a punch line, an […]
Jargon: Making it all about you
Everyone says they hate it. But they continually invite it to the party, then act surprised when it shows up. Do we even know what jargon looks like? Many think it’s acronyms or their company’s internal language. Others say it’s trendy buzzwords and phrases. (With the 90s well behind us, I thankfully haven’t heard of […]
