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.
To correct or not to correct
Tricky situations arise when someone uses a word in the wrong context or when it is pronounced incorrectly. We have all experienced that moment when our great story has been interrupted by someone saying something like, ‘You mean dock the boat, not park the boat, because you park cars, not boats – don’t you?’
Peter Riches at Tender Management Roadshow 2012
Red Pony principal consultant Peter Riches presents at Tender Management Roadshow 2012.
Lessons from IKEA
As I assembled a new wardrobe last weekend in the spare-room-cum-study that is soon to be my daughter’s new bedroom, I was struck by just how simple yet effective the instructions were. Perhaps more striking was the fact that they didn’t contain a single word.
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.
Think before you write
Next time you are about to launch into writing something important, metaphorically bite your tongue and consider your reader before you start writing or your message may not be read the way you intended.
Managing the email deluge
Email is the great contemporary communication blessing and curse—ubiquitous, instant … and inescapable. There’s over 300 billion of them flying round the world every single day, some of them useful, most of them spam.
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!
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.
Managing cross-platform reliability
As you may (or may not) be aware, Red Pony runs a Macintosh office. While this makes for an agreeable and elegant technological environment, we often require access to the Microsoft platform so we can be 100 per cent compatible with clients’ office environments.
If you type two spaces after a full stop, you’re wrong!
Despite its prevalence, a double space at the end of a sentence is simply incorrect.
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.
Why proofreading is not an optional extra
After all the hard work that goes into a project, if the documentation provided to the client contains spelling and grammatical errors, is poorly structured and generally difficult to read, it reflects badly on everyone involved, and the expense saved on proofreading may prove to be a greater cost in the long run.
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?
Don’t let the manual be an afterthought
I’ve come across a couple of events in the media recently that have served to highlight the importance of good documentation, and the significant risks of not having a clear and credible user manual.
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.
Google refines search algorithm to reward originality
In February this year Google announced a significant change to the algorithm it uses to rank search results. What’s most notable about the change is that it’s designed to reward websites that feature quality, original content.
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.
Harnessing the power of words
This short film offers a wonderful insight into the power of language to actually change the way we think about our world. It also demonstrates how a simple idea can be communicated much more effectively by choosing a different combination of words.
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.