In our work we spend a lot of time sending written documents back and forwards with our clients, and sometimes email just doesn’t cut it, especially if we want to send large documents or collaborate on writing.

Luckily there is a huge range of free, online tools to help make it easier to share information and collaborate online. Here’s a good list of some useful services …read more>>

Simple, concise language, short sentences and plenty of sub-headings are key to making a website easy to read, according to all the research. But how can you tell if you’ve done a good job in writing your web content?

I’ve just come across this great tool to measure and rank the readability of your web content: The Readability Test tool.

I found it in this very useful article on best practice tips for improving web content.  I recommend this article as a good start to anyone wondering how to tidy up their website.

And how did this site rank?! The tool said it should be easily understood by 15 to 16 year olds. Not quite our target market! … but we think we need to get it down even lower to around the 12-13 years age  group. We want it to be quickly and very easily understood by very busy people.

Here’s a page of links to tons of high-quality papers and essays about how users read on the Web and how authors should write their web pages.

Some high-level information about web writing is here.

Ever struggled with how to best structure your writing? Here are some style guides that may be useful. Some are free online tools; some are available to purchase online …

For journalists and freelance writers:

• The Guardian has a detailed style guide on its website.
• The Economist has some good guidelines online here.
• The Chicago Manual of Style is online as a subscription service.
• The Associated Press Stylebook is a well known tool for journalists and can be purchased here.

For technical writers:

• Read Me First, an IT style guide from Sun: it’s been online for a while now and not all pages are online but it’s a great online resource if you don’t have ready access to a style guide.
• The 2011 IBM style guide comes out next month and at a reasonable price.
• Microsoft’s Manual of Style (3rd Edition) is worth consulting from time to time, but it’s 7 years old now and so not worth purchasing — and no word, that I’ve seen, about when Edition 4 (currently being written) comes out.

For legal writing, here is the New Zealand Law Foundation’s guide.

For academic writing, the APA style guide is often used. Waikato University has key APA guidelines on its site.

For business writing, the Gregg Reference Manual is well known in the United States and can be purchased here.

For scientific writing:

• The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing is an online searchable tool.
• Oxford University Press has a web page of styles
• NASA has 100 pages online about grammar, punctuation, and capitalisation!

A bit of light-hearted language nonsense here, but apparently the following is a real sentence!

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Wikipedia explains.

Mamihlapinatapai … well, I guess you already know it’s a word from the Yaghan language (Tierra del Fuego), but what does it mean?! It’s a … “look shared by two people, each wishing the other would initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start.”

We won’t be squeezing it into a media release any time soon, but we like it and think it deserves its place in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word” and its reputation as one of the hardest words to translate.

Facttactic’s core business is writing for other businesses. We spend a lot of time doing it — writing, that is — and a lot of time thinking about how to make it better and how to give our clients the best writing service they could get.

So …  we always enjoy finding out what other accomplished writers have to say on the craft of writing. This Guardian article is a good read. It asks a bunch of established, British, fiction writers for tips on the dos and don’ts of writing.

While we don’t write fiction here at Facttactic, there’s a number of tips in the article we think are worth keeping in mind — Jeanette Winterson, for example: “Turn up for work. Discipline allows creative freedom. No discipline equals no freedom”, and Colm Tóibín: “Get on with it”. Consider it done!

I’ve found a pen that records and remembers what it writes and also records sounds and then links the recordings to the words that were being written at the time … when I first read about it I was blown away by the concept.

We don’t generally use this blog for product promotion, but as a writer and a regular interviewer who needs to record conversations, the Livescribe pen is one very cool piece of high-tech equipment.

But at $500 I won’t be buying one. Why? Well, when I can buy a full-spec computer for less than twice the price and a good quality digital voice recorder for well under half the price, I can’t see the value in that price point. If I could I would snap one up because it’s a neat toy, but unless the price drops a bit below its new-technology price, I’ll be sticking to my trusty blue biros and my hard-working, hard-wearing voice recorder.

“I need the sound of the keys, the keys of a manual typewriter. The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape. It’s an aesthetic issue.”  Not many people will have as sensory and physical a relationship with their keyboard as one of our favourite writers Don DeLillo.

He’s quoted in this Guardian article that looks at the future of publishing, e-books and reading and the blurring of lines between our ‘real’ lives and our digital ones.

The article is oddly apocalyptic in its view of the future of good writing but it raises some interesting questions to think over … I don’t know if I prefer reading from paper pages to reading from a screen, but there is something to be said for standing in front a shelf of familiar books, running your eyes aross the titles and authors on the spines and letting the fonts and colours and design of the cover help shape your memories and emotions as you work out what to read next.

A common query we get is how we get clients in to the media, and then how can we trust that the media won’t distort or twist our clients’ messages.

We think it’s simple: our clients that get into the media do so because they have a good story to tell, a story that’s worth hearing and worth airing. Our job is to help present the story to the media in a way that is clear, attractive and easily understood by a busy newsroom. The media in New Zealand are, by and large, responsive and responsible towards a good story honestly told; and our ongoing experience is that our clients are well-served by targeted media attention.

That is not to say they don’t get it wrong on occasion … and here’s a good read, a Canadian blogger’s list of media mistakes and corrections for 2009: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections.

Earlier this month we had Friday the 13th. Did it make you worried? You might have paraskevidekatriaphobia, apparently!

Now that’s a far more interesting word than unfriend, recently named Word of the Year. It means the act of removing someone as a friend on social networking sites such as Facebook.

Facebook might be phenomenon of the year but, heck, that word is lifeless.

Luckily, the search is on for Word of the Decade! So get in quick and vote for “chur bro” or “Google” or something; anything other, please, than unfriend.