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 since 2009 in our Red Pony Express newsletter.
This collection features a selection of our best articles.
An ode to the epistolary novel
From its prevalence in the earliest days of publication, the epistolary novel is now less common, yet still it persists. Perhaps it’s to do with the thrill of receiving a humble handwritten letter.
So many books, so little time. Is Blinkist the answer?
The tower of unread books on my bedside table is growing. And with it, my guilt. I consider myself a ‘reader’, not someone who smugly displays books but never cracks the spines!
Rearranging slide decks on the Titanic
PowerPoint’s inventors imagined a simple aid to verbal communication, yet now it has mutated into its own genre and embedded itself in the DNA of corporate and government communications. Is PowerPoint doomed to an eternity in the icy depths of workplace ennui?
Letting the words come
What goes through your head while you’re writing? For many writers, this internal voice is negative, like author Haruki Murakami who said in an interview, ‘When a writer develops a story, he is confronted with a poison that is inside him.’
Out-of-office and out-of-mind?
With many businesses closing over the holiday period, many of us will be setting up an automated email to let people know that we’re out-of-office. You wouldn’t want this email to make people think you weren’t serious about your job, would you?
Making writing enjoyable
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.
Inventing a language of peace
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?
Don’t fear the ghostwriter
Q. When is a writer not the writer?
A. When they’re a ghostwriter.
Using headings to create impact
Whether you are writing a 100-page report or a one-page fact sheet, effective use of headings can greatly enhance your document.
Command centre: using imperatives in copywriting
Of the four kinds of English sentences – declarative, interrogative, exclamatory and imperative – the imperative might be the one you use least in your writing. It can be tricky to tell someone what to do without sounding blunt, even rude.
Too many notes – tips for succinct writing
Writing succinctly isn’t easy. Here are my top tips for trimming those excess words.
Taking simple seriously
While we’ve documented the formal push by governments in the United States and New Zealand to legislate plain language in the past, we’ve recently seen a shift towards producing easier to read documents at the grassroots level here in Australia. At Red Pony, we use a 3-tier system to classify the different requirements for any simplified English project.
Neologisms: language upcycling through the ages
Unsurprisingly, neologisms are often the by-product of a cultural or technological shift. In the case of the pandemic, reactionary linguistic terms spawned rapidly to cope with an intensifying global crisis.
Simple tips for refreshing website content
Like a lot of other businesses, we’ve been using the COVID-19 downtime to do a bit of housekeeping, including the next iteration of the Red Pony website (more about that soon). We’ve also been helping several other clients develop content to update their own sites, so I thought I’d use this opportunity to provide a few tips on writing for the web.
Seeing names: the fascinating world of synaesthesia
I’m terrible at remembering people’s names. I’m well aware of this deficiency and over the years I’ve made a conscious effort to address it, admittedly with limited success. As Dale Carnegie once observed, ‘A person’s name is, to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language.’
A New Year's resolution on hedging
As 2020 draws near, I think about what I did this time last year, when I said things such as ‘I reckon I’ll exercise more’, ‘Maybe I’ll join the gym’. Hang on. ‘I reckon’? ‘Maybe’? What’s that?
Four writing styles and when to use them
If you were to read the instructions for operating a nuclear reactor, you would expect it to be written very differently to a novel about a nuclear accident, or a newspaper editorial about the merits (or otherwise) of nuclear power.
One idea for better writing
It sounds a bit simplistic to say to that one idea will improve your writing, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Just one idea can make a big difference.
Is English becoming toxic?
Despite a global push for the use of plain English to boost reader understanding and accessibility, recent language trends and buzzwords suggest that English is actually becoming less accessible for the average user.
The global language of Christmas decorations
Many years ago I spent my first (and to date only) Christmas in Europe, where I experienced the winter-themed decorations adorning the streets and shopfronts in their original context for the first time.