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.
Pedants’ corner: Old words, new meanings
The philosophers tell us that life is change. And this applies to language no less than it does to the creeping decrepitude of our mortal flesh. However, just as there will come a time when I can be more accurately described as ‘food for worms’ than ‘Andrew’, so there comes in the evolution of a word—‘literally’, for example—a point at which its old meaning is eclipsed by its new.
PerfectIt! editing software
PerfectIt! from Intelligent Editing claims to locate typos and grammatical errors in Microsoft Word documents – which is what the spell checker does already, I hear you say. Yes, this is true, but it also claims to detect other errors that ‘no spelling or grammar check will discover’. What they are talking about is consistency, which can be one of the biggest headache-sources for editors.
Who am I writing for?
It can be a fraught matter, trying to ‘set the tone’ of a piece of writing. And when you’re trying to sell or promote something, your ear needs to be well calibrated to what your audience likes to hear.
Ask the punctuation doctor
While the correct use of en or em dashes can bring clarity to a sentence that contains a number of complicated, interconnected ideas, in a lot of cases it can be better to break such a long sentence down into shorter ones. As an exercise, this is worth trying. It can help you pare an idea down to its essentials and force the subsidiary material to justify its presence. Maybe you don’t need those parenthetical statements after all?
The value of handwriting
It wasn’t so long ago that every writing task started with a pen and paper, and possibly a snifter of port in front of a warm fire. That’s a much more welcoming creative environment, isn’t it? And while the most agreeable parts of that environment can’t be replicated in most offices, you can at least turn off the disapproving Cyclops on your desk and pick up a pen … or pencil, or crayon. Don’t laugh. Any strategy that connects you with the neglected part of your brain that flourished in infancy can produce terrific creative advantages.
Fix your grammar and improve your business
Sometimes at Red Pony we find ourselves trying to explain to a reluctant client just where the value lies in getting their business writing edited. ‘Perfect grammar ain’t gonna help me sell more widgets!’ I hear them cry.
Episodes in the archaeology of spelling
Spelling in the English language can sometimes seem a very arbitrary proposition. Aside from the peculiarities within the language itself, there’s the long list of variations between US and British/Australian usage.
How am I coming across?
It may seem obvious to say it, but how often do you check your own business correspondence (especially email) for similar lapses in decorum that may be slipping through?
Using the spell-checker
How often has the spell-checker saved you from a blunder, typo or solecism? How often has it caused one?
Keep it simple, stupid – it's the law
Do you ever find yourself wading through a swamp of verbal sludge issued from a torpid governmental organ and wonder, ‘Does it have to be this complicated?’ The answer is ‘no’ – in fact, in the USA it’s now illegal to be.
The passive voice
The passive voice gets a bad press. From Don Watson to the Microsoft Word green squiggle under so many of our sentences, it has no shortage of critics. But if it’s so bad, what’s it doing in the English language anyway?
Starting an argument
When you know what you want to say—when you’ve taken the time to get your thoughts clear in your own mind—it becomes a far simpler matter to organise those thoughts on the page.
Fulsome prison blues
Sometimes words betray us; they don’t necessarily mean what we think they mean. We can go for years misusing relatively common words or phrases, getting them ever so slightly (or totally) wrong. It can be quite embarrassing, especially once we find out we’ve been getting it wrong all our lives.
Verbing nouns
But where does experimentation with language stop and gibberish start? A recent article in the Boston Globe tackled the problem of ‘verbing’ nouns. What? Well, when you verb a noun you are – just like it sounds – turning it into a verb.
Spelling traps – licence/license and practice/practise
The closest competitors for the stationary/stationery pairing (one of which, hopefully the correct one, you’ll find in my article above) for the title of Most Confused Spelling are the practice/practise and licence/license combinations.
Etymology corner
Welcome to an occasional feature of the Red Pony Express that will uncover the murky origins of mysterious phrases that have entered everyday idiom but which do not immediately betray their origins. This month: pushing the envelope, which means to exceed or extend the boundaries of the possible (or indeed, the permissible).
Rogue adjectives and adverbs
After wading through the fragrant fields of florid prose that can be the unmistakeable hallmark of some popular fiction, you may think overuse of adjectives and adverbs wouldn’t be such an issue in the drab world of business writing. Well … you’d be right, up to a point.
Writing for the web
While the goal in writing for the web is the same as for any other medium (convey your message clearly to your audience), there are a few differences to keep in mind.
What have the French ever done for us?
What we can say with a fair measure of certainty is that French brought with it a dose of class consciousness that’s never really left the English language. This is unsurprising when you consider that the invaders simply made French the official language of Church, Law and State. Any social advancement would therefore have to be done in French.
Using the comma
There’s an almost limitless range of conditional prescriptions to dictate comma usage, but I’ve boiled them down to a few of the most useful.