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.
Forensic linguists identify criminals by their writing style
The way you write – the length of your sentences, your use of punctuation, or your intractable belief that ‘professional’ should have two Fs in it – creates a linguistic ‘fingerprint’ that can be used to identify you. Forensic linguists have been tasked with examining blackmail letters, death threats, potentially faked suicide notes and even historical items, such as the famous ‘Bixby letter’, supposedly penned by Abraham Lincoln, but a matter of fierce debate.
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.
What I love about Red Pony clients
Earlier this month I was in Canberra for an Australian Government trade fair. Red Pony is a member of the government’s communications services panel, so I was there to meet people from the various departments and agencies who might engage our services. As I chatted to attendees, I began to reflect on the sales process for writing and editing services.
Does the language you use change the way you think?
As a writer and editor I’ve always believed that the words you use matter – that all synonyms are not created equal. For example, if you were describing a traffic accident, would you say the cars contacted each other, hit, bumped, collided or smashed?
Making accessible Word documents
No clear thinking organisation would deliberately exclude potential clients or customers. Yet if you aren’t providing your audience with accessible Word documents, you may be doing exactly that.
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 truth about texting
Are you really committing a grievous error by using correct punctuation in text messages? A recent study out of the US getting a lot of media attention seems to suggest exactly that. But how much can we really read into their findings?
Why I won’t be reading ‘Go Set a Watchman’
A little while back I was chatting to another dad at a children’s birthday party. He was telling me how he’d just bought a copy of Harper Lee’s new novel, Go Set a Watchman. Angelo talked of his anticipation of re-entering the fictional world of Maycomb County, having greatly enjoyed Harper Lee’s first and, until very recently, only published novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, as a teenager.
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.
How copyright works
The galloping development of the internet and other technologies is making the world’s creative work – literature, painting, music, games, film – available at the touch of a few keys. But just because you can easily reproduce or re-publish something you find online, doesn’t mean it’s legal to do so.
Why Coca-Cola is better than Pepsi (grammatically speaking)
To what degree is good grammar a predictor of overall success? According to a recent study, there may be a correlation between good writing and how a company performs against its competitors.
Barbarous mutilations
This brings us to the thorny matter of punctuation. All these abbreviations lost their full stop long ago. Even some relatively new ones, like app for application, are allowed to stand alone (and obviously, using full stops when tweeting and texting would defeat the purpose of the abbreviations that have developed, if u c wot I mean. But in formal text, what is the convention for punctuating words that still feel like abbreviations?
Are you tender-ready?
If you’ve ever responded to a request for tender (or RFT), you will know just how arduous the process can be. While the rewards for a successful submission are significant, the job of responding to a long list of complex requirements within a short timeframe puts many off before they start.
Why Word 2016 for Mac is a damp squib
When I installed the preview version of Word 2016 for Mac last week, I did the same thing as I have done for every version since the release of Word 2004 for Mac. And on each occasion I’ve been sorely disappointed.
Failure of the heart muscle
The English language has a huge and rich vocabulary, having absorbed words from so many other languages: Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, Latin, Norman French, Yiddish, Anglo-Saxon, German … so why restrict ourselves to a small set of tired clichés that convey little if any meaning?
Australia’s oldest words
Every country where English is spoken has contributed local words to an already large vocabulary. Every day in Australia we use words originating from some of the hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.
Questions to ask before updating your website
The process of developing and launching a new website can be exhausting. It can take months (and sometimes years) to progress through the concept, design, content development, configuration and testing phases before the new site is finally uploaded to the live server. But what happens next?
Using tables
The very act of organising information into a matrix—grouping and labelling rows and columns in a meaningful way—is an important step in interpreting data for your readers. Here are a few tips for making the most of this handy device.
Avoid embarrassment with five easy proofreading tips
Do you have a favourite typo? Enter ‘funny typos’ into Google and you’ll find a seemingly endless list of humorous malapropisms, spoonerisms, misspellings and grammatical errors.
Using the hyphen
As an editor I spend quite a lot of time looking things up in the dictionary. The most common reason for me to do this is to check whether or not a word or phrase should be hyphenated.