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.
Making writing enjoyable
The average human has 70,000 thoughts a day and it has never been more difficult to organise these thoughts onto the page and construct a piece of writing worth reading.
Finding your flow
This is the first in a series of pieces to better understand how we can reach this ‘flow state’ to make writing and editing less painful and more rewarding.
Notes on transparency
If we take transparency to be a feature of good journalism and reporting, does that mean euphemism is an enemy of ‘good writing’?
Command centre: using imperatives in copywriting
Of the four kinds of English sentences – declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative – the imperative might be the one you use least in your writing. It can be tricky to tell someone what to do without sounding blunt, even rude.
Nothing happens, but you can’t look away
In a world of shortening attention spans, productivity hacks and immediate gratification, red ball cricket is an anachronism, tying bringing us back to locality, patience and endless summers.
Version control: keeping track of collaborative editing projects
Whether you’re writing for yourself, as part of a small team or a large government agency, version control is an essential part of the drafting process. Editing is no different.
Taking simple seriously
While we’ve documented the formal push by governments in the United States and New Zealand to legislate plain language in the past, we’ve recently seen a shift towards producing easier to read documents at the grassroots level here in Australia. At Red Pony, we use a 3-tier system to classify the different requirements for any simplified English project.
In short: literature condensed
In short, a good summary will provide the right level of crucial information for a general audience, while also inviting the reader to go deeper if they wish. Condensed forms of writing can paradoxically be the best way to expand our knowledge of a subject.
‘I do’ and other performative utterances
Language allows us to put words to the world we see around us, but on special occasions words can do more.
Planes, trains and automobiles
While writing a book is private and sedentary, publicising a book is anything but. This is a meditation on planes, trains and automobiles, which many of us will embark upon over the holiday period.
The heredity of royal words
With the Queen’s passing being so present in the news, we’ve all been surrounded by a family of words with an interesting heredity.
A thousand words: Writing effective image descriptions
Images are a great way to make writing engaging, but are they making your writing less accessible? By providing a simple description of each image using the alt-text field in webpages, Word documents and other digital formats, you can make your content more accessible to users of screen reading software, including people who are blind or have low vision.
Cite management
All writing which makes claims based on available information requires citation. To help use citations effectively, it’s important to understand why we use them and how to use citations appropriately in context.