24 April, 2017
From the Ethos CRS Editing Team If you want to discover words you’ve never heard of and never thought you’d use, bureaucracies—both government and corporate—can be the place to go. New terms, jargon, acronyms and euphemisms bombard you every day. […]
24 April, 2017
By Susannah Bishop and John Preston We like to believe we’re a culture of tolerance and understanding. We’re in the land of ideas. Mercifully—at least in Australia—the days of being imprisoned for disagreeing with those in power are long gone. Also […]
19 April, 2017
By John Preston Maslow hierarchy of needs and Bloom’s taxonomy of learning Humans are curious creatures. On one level, we are capable of profound understanding and complex cognition. On another we are completely dependent on the most basic physiological and […]
19 April, 2017
By John Preston In ancient Greek mythology, Theseus—the founder of Greek democracy—entered the Labyrinth on the island of Minos and conquered the Minotaur. Theseus was renowned for his great strength, courage and—above all—wit. Today’s regulatory and policy environments are a […]
5 April, 2017
Using an ‘s’ over a ‘z’ is one of the most obvious differences between Australian English and American English. It’s an area of huge debate—when are grammar rules of opposing English-speaking countries ever not?—but also of huge confusion. Everyday grammarians […]
3 April, 2017
By John Preston Let’s face it; if facts were enough, we wouldn’t still be discussing the science of climate change, would we? And yet here we are. Why is this? Could the problem lie with the fact that we don’t […]
3 April, 2017
By Robert Garran  ‘A storm is brewing over spectacular Katherine Gorge about Aboriginal land rights.’ Back when I was a rookie journalist on the Age in the 1980s, I wrote an article that began something like that. I’ve forgotten the […]
31 March, 2017
By Robert Garran I’ve started reading an insightful book by Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times—called Easternisation: War and Peace in the Asian Century—that provides a great example of the importance of structure in driving compelling writing. The book starts […]
27 March, 2017
For some, the debate about changing free speech provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 is a tenth-order issue. The Deputy Prime Minister, for example, has been quoted in Fairfax papers as saying, “It is definitely not the issue people are talking about […]
22 March, 2017
In our courses on Giving and receiving feedback, we find that a lot of people don’t really understand the feedback process—what it is or how to do it properly. Feedback is an integral part of developing a team in an office. […]
22 March, 2017
These days everyone works as a writer. No matter their background or whether they work as a tinker, a tailor, a soldier or spy. Everyone writes as part of their job—be it emails, reports, business cases, decision briefs or proposals […]
19 February, 2017
Ever wonder what’s behind the Ethos CRS magic? Here’s an example of how we deconstruct bad writing—and put it back together again. Take a look at this sentence: In determining the appropriate location, range and scale of suppliers to be […]