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.
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.
The real magic of a letter to Santa
In a time when communication is primarily digital, and mostly informal, the seemingly simple act of writing a letter to Santa retains a special significance. Children once wrote regularly to people such as grandparents, other family members and penfriends. Now, a letter to Santa may be a child’s only experience of formal correspondence.
Words are cheap but jargon comes at a cost
Most professions and industries have their own jargon – words and phrases that have a specific meaning within a particular group but a different meaning (or none at all) outside the group. To those who use it regularly, jargon can be inclusive. It’s the kind of language you hear at […]
The genius of George Orwell
Back when I was a university student contemplating a topic for my English Literature Honours thesis, I thought it might be interesting to examine the early works of George Orwell, one of my favourite writers at the time. After twelve months of immersing myself in biographies, literacy criticism, opinion pieces and pretty much the entire […]
The generosity of plain English
Red Pony’s business writing trainer describes plain English writing as ‘putting the extra work in so your reader doesn’t have to’. Putting that extra effort in is an act of generosity towards your reader – it’s a kindness.
Leading the reading: wayfinding in document design
‘Wayfinding refers to information systems that guide people through a physical environment and enhance their understanding and experience of the space.’
Are print dictionaries dying? And should we care?
In 2010, the Oxford English Dictionary announced that its next edition would probably never be printed, but would instead only be available online. The 20-volume dictionary is the most comprehensive in the world, but that much data can now be stored on a device the size of a pencil case.
Why simpler isn’t always clearer
A lot of our work at Red Pony involves simplifying technical language to make it accessible to a wider audience, who may not be familiar with industry terminology, be it government acronyms, financial jargon or technobabble. This is work I strongly believe in: if an idea has value, then it deserves to be understood by all of the people who might benefit from it.
Don’t lead your readers up the garden path
‘The government plans to raise taxes were defeated.’ Did you stumble over that sentence? If you’re like most people, you read ‘government’ as a noun and ‘plans’ as a verb, and when you got to ‘were defeated’, the sentence suddenly made no sense, and you had to go back and read it again.
The Clayton’s apology
When we do the wrong thing, whether intentionally or unintentionally, we should apologise, particularly to any person we have harmed in some way. Few people will argue with this in theory. But some apologies are not apologies.