Insights

The saying goes that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. The same is true for writing. Style – in how we choose an outfit or structure a sentence – evidences our desire to be taken seriously. People notice when we ‘make an effort’ with writing, the same way they notice when we wear a freshly ironed shirt.

When a 12-storey apartment building collapsed in Miami in 2021, killing 98 people, many observers couldn’t understand how previous building inspections had failed to avert the disaster. We now understand that while faults were obvious, inspection reports failed because they obscured them.

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.

When the French used their veto to vote down a resolution at the 1921 Assembly of the League of Nations, did they unwittingly thwart the world’s best chance to foster world peace and international understanding?