Insights archive
Red Pony is a team of writers, editors, Microsoft Office template developers and communications trainers. We have been writing about our areas of expertise for over a decade in our Red Pony Express newsletter.
This collection features the best articles from the last 10 years.
Spam, spam, spam, spam
The curse of spam is one with which every reader will be familiar. It’s now just one more daily task to eradicate the emails that slip past the spam filter of our email programs, usually playing on one or the other of the top two human desires: sex and money.
Talking up down time
While there is a profusion of business advice about how to manage your time better (code for how to fill every waking minute with activity), there is precious little written in favour of stillness, quiet and uninterrupted thought.
Time to get with the program/me
Under the new dispensation of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, there are going to be a few changes. But here at Red Pony we’ll restrict our discussion to the orthographical changes (that’s ‘spelling’ to you and me).
These are a few of my least favourite words
Meal. Decent. Bowl. What do these seemingly inoffensive words have in common?
Red Pony client moving up the BRW Top 100
Specialist environmental and engineering consultants O2 Group asked Red Pony to establish a suite of templates to streamline their business operations so they could spend most of their time on the things they know most about.
Clichés in the news media
While the cliché can be a warm bath of convenience into which the lazy writer is often tempted to sink, a fresh, arresting image is more likely to call the inattentive reader to attention. Remember that it is far more memorable to be slapped with a fish than with the bog-standard open palm to the face.
Behold the contronym
Like platypuses and echidnas, those creepy monotremes of the animal kingdom, the world of words contains a few rare and paradoxical oddities of its own. Consider the contronym.
For ‘whom’, the bell tolls
When was the last time you wrote ‘whom’? When was the last time you said it? I’ll bet the former happened more recently than the latter. As any change in the spoken language is invariably the precursor to a change in the written language, the writing has been on the wall — so to speak — for ‘whom’ for quite some time.
Foreign words and phrases in English
Why are there so many foreign words cluttering up our language? Well, they’ve been doing it for over a thousand years now, so if it ticks you off, you’re a bit late.
The war against cliché
If there’s one helpful thing to be said about making your writing clearer, it’s this: If you see a phrase you’ve heard a million times before (such as this one), replace it.
What the hell am I talking about?
A common piece of advice is to write the way you speak, the idea being that you will then be ‘freed up’ to express yourself without worrying about that intimidating blank page (or screen) before you. This may be useful to get you started, but if you send whatever you’ve written in the same spirit, look out.
The power of metaphor
But often your goal is to persuade as much as it is to inform. And that’s where metaphor is your friend. Metaphors are so prevalent they often pass unnoticed, but that doesn’t mean they don’t leave a powerful impression in the mind of your audience.
Fifty words for snow, no word for go
We’re all familiar with the observation that such-and-such a language has no word for ‘sorry’, or ‘please’, usually made in order to cast a slur on the character of the speakers of such an unsolicitous language. Citation of words such as schadenfreude (shameful joy at the misfortune of others), serves a similar purpose in reverse – they have a word for something nasty which they must be doing all the time, but which we don’t require, as such thoughts never cross our minds.
Grammar at work – who cares?!
Put simply, when you dash off an email and send it as soon as you’ve typed the final character, without rereading it and checking for errors, you’re saying to your recipient, ‘You are not important to me’. This may be your intention, but if it isn’t, take a breath and read that message one more time before you hit ‘send’.
Creeps from the deeps
Perhaps you are familiar with a common horror movie device – it’s the opposite of the ‘sudden surprise’ that startles the audience and the protagonist at the same time. This is the one where the monster/tidal wave/giant squid looms up behind the protagonist to reveal its vast immensity to the audience before the protagonist turns around to be devoured/drowned/ingested.
Mind your language
There’s a couple of different routes by which a word joins the vast English vocabulary: we enlist a Latin or Greek word to help us describe a new concept or object (the pneumatic tyre, the personal computer); or new words find us, crashing the party uninvited and ready to start meaning things all on their own.
Pick your national metaphor
I was listening to a visiting American political analyst on the radio the other day talking about the differences between Australian and American political language.
Peter Riches at Tender Management Roadshow 2012
Red Pony principal consultant Peter Riches presents at Tender Management Roadshow 2012.
Hvae you seen tihs beofre?
What are we doing when we read? We are absorbing meaning through the symbols on the page or screen. This takes greater mental effort than simply listening, although that’s an act of interpretation as well.
Pronouns: A matter of life and death
In his recent book, The Secret Life of Pronouns, psychology professor James Pennebaker writes about how our use of pronouns reveals much about our social status, health, honesty … even our propensity to commit suicide!