Insights
Web writing for screen readers
Many guides to web writing talk about how people tend to read webpages in an ‘F’ pattern – reading the first...
Short but sweet – the art of microcopy
Making your message clear in limited space is a real challenge. Writers and editors know all too well that...
Quick guides to make your life easier
We have developed 2 practical guides to help you to achieve great content.
Tag, you’re it
On websites, you might have seen a list of topics circled at the end of an article. Those topics are ‘tags’....
Creating a narrative
One of the current buzzwords in content development seems to be ‘narrative’. It’s talked about as a goal for...
The origins – and cost! – of bureaucratese
As a plain-English editor, I spend a lot of time converting dense ‘bureaucratese’ into language that is...
‘Right’ or ‘wrong’ might depend on when you ask
A particular challenge for our editors is when spelling ‘rules’ change. This is often because of...
How a diagram changed the world
As we have said before, design is more than just making it pretty.
Visual tools can help us to better understand ideas and concepts. Indeed, sometimes they can even shape the way we think.
The art of structural editing
Although there are many guides to writing, copyediting and proofreading, structural editing (or ‘edit1’) is harder to define and explain. At its heart, it is about the audience. The aim of an edit1 is to make sure the audience can quickly and easily grasp the information you are presenting; a logical, intuitive structure helps you to achieve that.
Those pesky apostrophes
A friend recently joked that it was ironic that the ACT Writers Association couldn’t get the apostrophe right, when the National Farmers’ Federation could.
Is she right?
It turns out that some phrases and titles that look like they might need an apostrophe actually don’t.
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Almost every website, brochure or poster has that familiar phrase at the end: ‘For further information …’.
But is more information necessarily better?
You can’t always get what you want
It may seem to be a poor business model, but at Biotext we sometimes find that we have better results when we don’t give clients what they want.