Watch out for my new book, With My Little Eye - the true story of a family of Australian spies.

Dudley and Joan Doherty worked for ASIO during the Cold War and they raised their children to help with espionage work. The three children—Mark, Sue-Ellen, and Amanda—were taught to memorise number plates and faces, to follow people, and…
writing tips and advice writing for your audience

Writing Tips - Write for your Audience

Write for your reader, right for you. Guest writer Good writers consider their audience; bad writers don’t—it’s the first principle of effective writing. Here’s a lively summary of why your audience matters and how to work out what…

Don’tcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me?

Don’tcha wish your girlfriend was hot like me? Did the songwriter who penned the line in this title get it right or wrong? Should the girlfriend be hot like me or hot like I? Grammatically speaking, it should be hot like I, but songwriters…
apostrophe writing when to use an tips advice

Apostrophe users are practically superhuman

Why did everyone stay away from the Giant Kid’s Playground? Because they were afraid of the giant kid, of course. This is one of the many apostrophe jokes in Lyn Truss’s classic punctuation text, Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which is so endearing…
writing in active and passive voice

Be more active

What’s wrong with this sentence? ‘A decision was made by the committee.’ The problem is that it’s in passive voice. Passive voice is an indirect way of saying something that puts the subject at the end of the sentence, instead of…

Proofreading tips and symbols for supervisors

Proofreading tips and symbols for supervisors This post answers a request from supervisors at the Department of Science, Information Technology, Information and the Arts (DSITIA) who were looking for tips on proofreading for their teams.…

Write instructions or procedures

Instructions When you’re writing instructions or procedures, remember that your readers are just like you: they hate reading instructions. Mostly they are reading them just before they need to use them. They may be feeling anxious or they…

Watch your tenses

When people with English as their first language ask me for help with tenses, it usually means they have been corrected at work for switching tenses. For example, they have switched from past to present tense in one sentence like this: When…