by Leslie O'Flahavan | Jul 12, 2025 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by WordRake.] In a just world, you wouldn’t have to convince your subject matter expert colleagues that your plain language edits make their documents better. And doctors wouldn’t have to convince patients to quit smoking, and...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Jun 12, 2025 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by ICMI.] Your company’s “Contact Us” page is the most utilitarian, least sexy page at your website. It has one job: helping people who need to contact you understand how to do it. But your Contact Us page likely contains flaws...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | May 12, 2025 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by ICMI.] As a lifelong writing teacher, I’m overwhelmed (traumatized?) by our industry’s gen AI frenzy. Yes, our agents will be faster if they use gen AI tools to reply to customers’ emails, chats, social posts, or ratings and...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Apr 12, 2025 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by Contact Center Pipeline.] All our customers deserve our empathy, but the ones who write to us in English when English isn’t their primary language deserve a heaping helping. For human kindness reasons, we should empathize with...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Mar 12, 2025 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by Contact Center Pipeline.] These 10 tips will enable you to focus on your message. Your heart is in the right place. You intend to focus on the important writing tasks on your to-do list: that detailed response to an angry...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Nov 15, 2024 | Whitepapers & Tools
The Quality Review Tool presents seven industry-tested standards for e-mail quality and explains what constitutes excellent performance on each standard. Use the Quality Review Tool to score customer service agents’ e-mails, coach agents, improve writing skills,...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Nov 15, 2024 | Whitepapers & Tools
We developed this social media writing guide for the Centers for Disease Control. While the examples will be most relevant to health communicators, the guidance about writing for social media is practical for any organization that wants to provide high quality social...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Nov 15, 2024 | Whitepapers & Tools
Months before the hectic holiday shopping season, we decided to conduct an experiment to find out which online retailer does customer service e-mail best. We sent the same e-mail query to seven big-name retailers that sell a certain toy croquet set we were interested...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Oct 29, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
[This article was originally published by WordRake.] If you’re a heartbroken poet living in an unheated garret in Paris, there’s no doubt your writing process includes suffering: the hours you spend gazing out the window, the inky splotches your fountain pen leaves on...
by Leslie O'Flahavan | Sep 9, 2024 | Featured, Writing Matters Blog
If you were building a playground for your local elementary school, you’d never install swings with chains that pinch little fingers or a teeter-totter that catapults kindergarteners into the air. A dangerous playground guarantees that half the kids end up in the...
