Writing

8 May, 2017

Keeping the important stuff in mind: a tip for annual reports

  It’s time to start that piece of writing no one wants to hear about: annual reports. Generally, their mention makes people sob and horses bolt. True enough, the worst sort of annual report is stupefyingly dull. But these reports are […]
5 May, 2017

What makes a great editor?

By Robert Garran, A few weeks ago, my twitter feed lit up with tweets praising, of all people, an editor who had just died. I could have let them pass by—like so many tweets—but these tweets had great passion. So in […]
24 April, 2017

Commonly confused words

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. […]
5 April, 2017

-ise vs -ize

  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 […]
3 April, 2017

Ready, steady, go! – Bridging the science—influence—policy divide in public sector policy

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 […]
3 April, 2017

Sticky tales—Tell a story to make ideas memorable

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

Structure—A crucial ingredient of successful writing

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 […]
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