Comments for Clarity Blog

Comment on Good websites save time by Susannah

Susannah — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:09:27 +0000

Thanks, Will. It’s simple: what do customers email you or ring the office to ask? If you have a helpdesk or a customer services team, log the queries and feed them back to whoever runs the website. As for FAQs, they are, or should be, redundant. They never seem to answer my question, just waste my time.

Comment on Good websites save time by Will Blackstock

Will Blackstock — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 10:38:32 +0000

So, Susannah, what’s the best way to find out what your customers want from your site? Do you recommend a bit of market research or publishing things and waiting to see what the most common questions are? Should websites uses FAQs? Are there any other better methods?

Comment on Could Dickens help your business writing? by Susannah

Susannah — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:22:30 +0000

Good point, Will. Being specific is more likely to get results.

Comment on Could Dickens help your business writing? by Will

Will — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:17:49 +0000

I think Dickens has an amazing ability to write extremely vivid portraits with words. Even the names of characters like Mr Guppy, Mr Gradgrind and Wackford Squeers tell you their dispositions.

Something that is often forgotten, I think, is the social commentary present in Dickens’ novels. The characters are deliberately fantastic, but the descriptions of poverty are no exaggeration. Many business people are obsessed with the abstract and so use abstract language to describe abstract situations. This becomes a problem when they continue to use abstract language to describe real situations and the reader’s understanding suffers. If Dickens had talked about the suffering of the poor in entirely abstract terms, I doubt that some subsequent welfare reforms would have been put in place.

Comment on What’s in a name? by Will

Will — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 10:57:22 +0000

The poor little apostrophe even has a Twitter feed all about how he’s trying to get by in the big city now Waterstones has kicked him out. Read his thoughts here: https://twitter.com/#!/SadApostrophe

Comment on What’s in a name? by Tana

Tana — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 09:59:16 +0000

Well, the apostrophe’s removal has certainly been an effective element in John Daunt’s rebranding and marketing campaign. Here we are talking about it.

Take pity on this poor old apostrophe.

http://twitter.com/#!/WstonesOxfordSt/status/157434332213026817/photo/1

Comment on Proofing and credibility by Rupert

Rupert — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 16:46:36 +0000

I hate it too, Chris. But the BBC Sherlock is a contemporary updating of Holmes, so maybe they can take more liberties with language. The House of Silk, by contrast, was intended to be faithful to Conan Doyle in style and period, and that, I think, makes the publisher’s errors much less forgiveable.

Comment on Proofing and credibility by Chris Mohr

Chris Mohr — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 19:39:18 +0000

I hope Mark Gatiss reads this.

In ‘Sherlock – a scandal in Belgravia’ on BBC1, Holmes was given the line: “…when you sent John and I in there.”

Did nobody on set notice?

Comment on Collaborative writing by Chris Mohr

Chris Mohr — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 16:08:11 +0000

A posthumous postscript to my blog from HG Wells:

“No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.”

(Thanks to Guardian style guide on Twitter.)

Comment on Collaborative writing by Will

Will — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:54:45 +0000

Is tracking changes really all that bad? I know that it can leave the final version of a document unrecognisable. But it does mean you can see who is responsible for taking out your lovely, flowing prose and turning it into an unlovely, tangled mess (or, I suppose, improving your work).

Being able to ask people directly why they have changed something is useful.