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.
Red Pony client moving up the BRW Top 100
Specialist environmental and engineering consultants O2 Group asked Red Pony to establish a suite of templates to streamline their business operations so they could spend most of their time on the things they know most about.
When your number’s up
There are different conventions that you can follow when presenting numbers and measurements in a document. There is no single correct method, but observing some generally accepted principles will make your documents clearer for the reader, and will present your organisation in a more professional light.
Clichés in the news media
While the cliché can be a warm bath of convenience into which the lazy writer is often tempted to sink, a fresh, arresting image is more likely to call the inattentive reader to attention. Remember that it is far more memorable to be slapped with a fish than with the bog-standard open palm to the face.
And so it begins
‘They threw me off the hay truck about noon.’ Author Stephen King cites this opening line from James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice as a great example of how to begin a book.
Every pica tells a story
Clear writing and a firm editorial hand (whether your own or Red Pony’s) are the most important elements of clear business communication. But visual presentation also makes a big difference in getting your point across.
Behold the contronym
Like platypuses and echidnas, those creepy monotremes of the animal kingdom, the world of words contains a few rare and paradoxical oddities of its own. Consider the contronym.
Five basic rules of email
The instantaneous nature of email means people can communicate and collaborate in the workplace to a degree never before possible. Clients or colleagues might be in a different city or even a different country, but email enables them to exchange information and ideas instantly – as if they were just over the partition. Well, almost.
Indiana Jones and the creative process
Reading how Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan evolved their plot, trying different ideas in the process (at first the vital clue is in the form of a map, at one stage Marion is a Nazi sympathiser, and another suggestion has Indy trying to steal the headpiece from her) makes you realise just how complex the creative process can be, and how many ideas must be discarded or edited out along the way.
Once upon a time in America
Yet there are many words we use every day that came to us from America, and which Australians probably considered alien at first. Some describe indigenous cultural traditions, flora or fauna, so it is no surprise that a local name was needed: moccasin, papoose, powwow, pecan, skunk, igloo and wigwam are examples. The origins of some other words are less obvious to us today: totem, shack, chocolate, barbecue, hammock, hurricane and cannibal are all of Amerindian derivation.
For ‘whom’, the bell tolls
When was the last time you wrote ‘whom’? When was the last time you said it? I’ll bet the former happened more recently than the latter. As any change in the spoken language is invariably the precursor to a change in the written language, the writing has been on the wall — so to speak — for ‘whom’ for quite some time.
Foreign words and phrases in English
Why are there so many foreign words cluttering up our language? Well, they’ve been doing it for over a thousand years now, so if it ticks you off, you’re a bit late.
What the font?
When the physicist announcing the possible discovery of the Higgs boson last July used the font Comic Sans in her presentation, she unwittingly became a combatant in the war against this widely derided typeface. But in choosing Comic Sans, perhaps Fabiola Gianotti was deliberately drawing on recent studies that suggest fonts that are harder to read actually help us retain information.
The war against cliché
If there’s one helpful thing to be said about making your writing clearer, it’s this: If you see a phrase you’ve heard a million times before (such as this one), replace it.
What the hell am I talking about?
A common piece of advice is to write the way you speak, the idea being that you will then be ‘freed up’ to express yourself without worrying about that intimidating blank page (or screen) before you. This may be useful to get you started, but if you send whatever you’ve written in the same spirit, look out.
The power of metaphor
But often your goal is to persuade as much as it is to inform. And that’s where metaphor is your friend. Metaphors are so prevalent they often pass unnoticed, but that doesn’t mean they don’t leave a powerful impression in the mind of your audience.
Is your website losing you business?
One of your first tasks when setting up a new business is to establish a website. Your internet presence is indispensible for advertising your products or services to the world. But what if your website is doing more harm than good?
Fifty words for snow, no word for go
We’re all familiar with the observation that such-and-such a language has no word for ‘sorry’, or ‘please’, usually made in order to cast a slur on the character of the speakers of such an unsolicitous language. Citation of words such as schadenfreude (shameful joy at the misfortune of others), serves a similar purpose in reverse – they have a word for something nasty which they must be doing all the time, but which we don’t require, as such thoughts never cross our minds.
Grammar at work – who cares?!
Put simply, when you dash off an email and send it as soon as you’ve typed the final character, without rereading it and checking for errors, you’re saying to your recipient, ‘You are not important to me’. This may be your intention, but if it isn’t, take a breath and read that message one more time before you hit ‘send’.
Applying styles in Microsoft Word
Way back in issue #2 of the Red Pony Express, we wrote about the advantages of using Microsoft Word templates to improve the presentation and usability of your written materials. However, there’s not much use in having a suite of nicely formatted templates if no one actually knows how to use them.
Red Pony wins contract with Department of Health
Red Pony is pleased to announce that we have successfully tendered to the Victorian Department of Health to provide web content services for the flagship website, the Better Health Channel.