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.
The perfection of a good cartoon
When I think about my top 5 dream jobs, the occupation of ‘political cartoonist’ always makes the list. It’s not because I have a talent for drawing (I don’t). But I love the idea of being paid to come up with a witty and thought-provoking image that succinctly sums up the issue of the day.
Origins of punctuation
Regular readers will know that we’ve written a range of articles in the past about the purpose of different punctuation marks and how to use them in your writing. This time, I want to talk about the origins of punctuation itself.
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.
Holiday season reading
The year is quickly coming to an end and Christmas is just around the corner. One thing I really enjoy about this time of year is finally having the time to finally read some of the books that have been piling up on the shelf.
From Shakespeare's Globe to Fountain Gate: how pop culture shapes English
Pop culture enriches language in delightful ways. TV catchphrases that become part of everyday speech transcend their origins, like countless phrases from Shakespeare which seamlessly integrate into modern English.
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.
Simplified Technical English: what it is and why it exists
Some time back, my colleague Andrew Eather wrote a Red Pony Express article about contronyms: a word that can have completely opposite meanings. The English language is endlessly plastic, but this can be a problem when lives depend on precision.
‘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.
And the word of the year is...
Each year the Macquarie dictionary announces its choice for Word of the Year. The winner, and indeed the shortlist of candidates, offers an insight into the events of the previous 12 months and how our society is changing. 2022 was no exception.
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.
Football through the eyes of Coodabeens
For me, one of the primary joys of sport is not just playing or watching it, but also talking about it. As a fan, it seems that getting paid to commentate or write about your favourite sporting code would be a pretty sweet gig.
Keeping up with language trends
For most Australians, 2020 will be forever remembered as the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. For the language geeks among us, it also marked the launch of 3 new national style guides.
Sign languages evolve just like any other language
The daily COVID update from our national leaders and top health officials has been a feature of this pandemic. We’re now so accustomed to seeing an Auslan interpreter at these pressers it seems strange to think that it wasn’t so long ago that their presence was an exception rather than the norm.
Yodish: not so out of this world
By inverting the sequence of certain words or phrases in a sentence, anastrophes can be a skilful way of getting readers to attend more carefully – and, in some cases, to ascribe more weight – to what is being said.
The many faces of English
The English language is chameleon-like: a previous Red Pony Express article noted the ease with which it reaches across the Atlantic and Pacific to cross-pollinate and reinvent itself.
Where words go when they die
The current online version of the Macquarie Dictionary lists 138,000 words and 210,000 different definitions. According to an online survey of 2 million (admittedly self-selected) people, the average adult has a vocabulary of 20,000–35,000 words. Which begs the question, what happens with the rest?
Developing a lifelong love of language
When my daughter started school a couple of years ago, one of the first things she was given was a list of ten words she was asked to learn to spell. Over the next few months more words were added until she had mastered one hundred different words.
BBC subcommittee on words goes rogue and has to be shut down
‘BBC English’ might now seem deeply conservative, but it was once the site of fierce and excitable debate among a literary set who, if not actually drunk, were certainly drunk with power.
The unexpected history of ‘Mrs’
The use of ‘Ms’, once controversial, is now mainstream. But it’s not so long ago it was viewed as political correctness gone mad. Personally, it’s bizarre to imagine that complete strangers ever felt entitled to know whether or not I am married.