Making websites accessible
How to make sure your website is accessible
Simon Jones, Founder & MD at Studio 24, Cambridge, answers questions from small business owners and designers on how to create accessible websites. Between 2020 and 2022, the Studio 24 team redesigned the website for the international web standards organisation W3C (founded by the inventor of the web Tim Berners-Lee) and continue to work with their team to support and develop their digital offering. The work won Studio 24 several awards including Gaadys - Honouring advances in digital accessibility, W3 Awards for Illuminating brilliance in digital experiences, content and creativity, and a BIMA Award, the UK’s longest-standing and most prestigious digital and tech award. Find our more about this work at Studio 24
Links mentioned in the video
Easy checks from W3C’s Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/preliminary/
Top 6 issues: https://webaim.org/projects/million/
Colour contrast is the biggest single issue.
Free accessibility course https://www.w3.org/WAI/courses/foundations-course/
Good tool to start accessibility testing https://accessibilityinsights.io/
Run a FastPass check to get started https://accessibilityinsights.io/docs/web/getstarted/fastpass/
Tips on designing for accessibility: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tips/designing/
This set of posters from GOVUK is also really good https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/09/02/dos-and-donts-on-designing-for-accessibility/
Free WordPress plugin https://sa11y.netlify.app/
And https://equalizedigital.com/accessibility-checker/
Browser plugins to help test for accessibility: https://www.deque.com/axe/browser-extensions/ And https://wave.webaim.org/
Colour contrast checker https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/
Avoid accessibility overlays https://www.studio24.net/blog/accessibility-overlays-panacea-placebo-or-poison/
Business case for accessibility https://www.w3.org/WAI/business-case/
These are the facts and figures I’ve used in talks before https://www.scope.org.uk/media/disability-facts-figures/
How many people are affected by a disability?
• 14 million people in UK
• 135 million people in EU
• 1 billion people worldwide
Finally, this is a good set of guides on accessibility for different job roles: https://accessibility-manual.dwp.gov.uk/guidance-for-your-job-role
Comments from the group chat
The RNIB have a guide called See It Right too and that gives pixel and point guidance for digital and print https://www.rnib.org.uk/living-with-sight-loss/independent-living/accessible-nhs-and-social-care-information/creating-accessible-information-and-communication-resources-for-health-and-social-care/
https://jetpack.com/features/security/library/enable-accessibility-plugin/
This is one of my favourite things to use at the moment to show how many people have accessibility needs that visit your site: https://design.education.gov.uk/learn/how-many-users
How to use social media to make your life better
Is it possible that social media can be a force for good?
We're all familiar with the bad aspects of social media. Can we really use it to make our lives better?
Lauren Hug, J.D., LL.M. believes we can.
In fact she's proved it.
Lauren is a speaker on the Upsides of Our Digital World, and a Community-Building, Engagement, & Participation Strategist. She also has a successful Substack Newsletter and has been exploring how to collectively use social media to advance collaboration and community.
Her books Digital Grace and Digital Kindness have transformed the way people behave on-line with the message, “Share the world you want to see”, providing a powerful counterpoint to the outrage many people experience on digital platforms.
Lauren writes about Digital Hope on Substack. Find out more at https://digitalhope.substack.com/
We invited Lauren to join us to discuss how social media can open windows into the lives of people we might not ever meet through other means, and how we can use it better understand and empathize with those who have different views to our own.
This is Lauren's introduction to the discussion.
https://youtu.be/nscNbw2pvAo
In breakout rooms our members discussed how they could "Share the World They Want to See" and not just use social media for marketing.
This passage from Lauren's latest newsletter sums it all up beautifully:
Much of my writing and speaking focuses on using social media to see others — those we’d likely never encounter in our physical spaces … and those communicating thoughts and aspects of themselves in digital spaces that they don’t always feel able to share in person.
By deliberately choosing to see others, social media can help us identify spaces and issues we have the power not to worry about or know about. When we find ourselves wondering why someone feels the need to post about something that isn’t important to us or that we think doesn’t belong in digital spaces, it’s a signal to ask ourselves whether our reaction is because it’s an issue we simply haven’t had to think about.
As my daughter replied when I rhetorically asked why a product that seemed pointless to me existed: “If you don’t know what it’s for, it wasn’t meant for you. It’s an accessibility thing you don’t need, but someone else does.” She succinctly reminded me to be curious when I encounter something that doesn’t make sense to me, rather than hastily making judgments based solely on my own perspective and experience.
On the flip side, sharing our experiences can help others become more aware of their positions of power. We can show people things they never had to think about, influencing the way they see the world by adding our stories to the online catalog of human experiences.
This is how we learn, grow, and build a better world together: by choosing to see the things we don’t have to and carrying our evolving awareness into everything we do.
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” -Maya Angelou
What is something social media made you aware of that you now choose to think about even though you don’t have to?
What is something you have no choice but to think about that you use (or can use) social media to share with others?
You can find Lauren's newsletter - and answer these questions at https://digitalhope.substack.com/
Connect with Lauren on LinkedIn and at HugSpeak
Buy the books Digital Hope and Digital Kindness and follow Lauren's author page on Amazon
If you're a member of Drive, the Collaborative Network, you can talk to Lauren in our Slack Group.
AI is awesome - except when it isn't!
What does the acceleration of AI development mean for us?
Many of the things we've become familiar with use AI.
In 1640 Blaise Pascal invented the first digital calculating machine and some inventions that rely on "artificial intelligence" go back a lot further than this.
The explosion of new apps since Microsoft invested $10 Billion in OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT which was launched in November 2022, has both excited and dismayed the world. Some see huge opportunities and some see the destruction of jobs. Some even see the destruction of humanity.
In this Ask the Expert event, we invited Jo Stansfield to give us her views.
Jo is the founder of Inclusioneering a social enterprise specialising in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) solutions and consultancy for technology and engineering organisations. Jo has been a member of ForHumanity for many years. For Humanity is a not-for-profit public charity that examines and analyses the downside risks associated with the ubiquitous advance of AI & Automation to engage in risk mitigation and ensure the optimal outcome ... for humanity.
This short video is Jo's introduction to the topic:
https://youtu.be/Fn6L4ZWYOQk
Jo shared this information about how ubiquitous AI is in our lives
In breakout rooms our members discussed how ChatGPT and many other AI apps have given them free, easy to use tools to create written content, videos, images, music, and much more.
The search formats of Bing's Chat GPT and Google's Bard have brought new dimensions and concerns to how information is accessed. This has many implications for SEO and for the huge search and advertising business (estimated at over $500 Billion) that Google has almost exclusive power over. When Samsung decided to use Bing as the default search engine on their latest mobile phone it prompted Google to accelerate the development of Bard to compete with ChatGPT.
There are also concerns about how information is being gathered and used to advance machine learning and how we can protect our original creations and both give and get credit where it's due.
The biggest concern is about accuracy and bias.
Jo's reflections on bias:
- Some are built in in the training data --- the quantity of data needed is huge. Mitigate with better training data?
- Some are in design --- limitations of what the design team consider. Mitigate with diverse teams.
- Some are introduced by the algorithms continuing to learn --- Mitigate with regular evaluation and review of performance, with means to rectify learned bias.
- Some are about self-reinforcement of bias cycle – e.g. ShotSpotter
- Some are by application not being valid for its deployed use
- Some are about access
We just scratched the surface of this hugely complex topic and are very grateful to Jo for giving us a glimpse of how things are developing so rapidly.
Find out more and get involved
- From The World Economic Forum: Here's how to make algorithms work for all of us.
- WATCH: Coded Bias (available on Netflix)
- READ: Weapons of Math Destruction (Penguin Books)
- GET INVOLVED: Volunteer with For Humanity
To get in touch with Jo Stansfield
Follow Jo on LinkedIn for regular updates of the work she's involved in.
Why is WordPress so popular?
WordPress is used by 43% of all websites.
- WordPress powers 10x more websites than its closest competitor.
- The world’s most popular ecommerce platform is WooCommerce (built on WordPress), with over 36% of the market share
- There are over 20,000 WordPress themes, including around 10,000 free themes in the WordPress Themes Directory
- There are around 60,000 free WordPress plugins on the WP plugin database
This is what makes it the most flexible tool in the world for building websites.
Susie Tobias gave this Ask the Expert presentation to celebrate the 20h Anniversary of WordPress. Susie, aka Wise Genius, has been building WordPress websites for over 13 years so has seen many of the things evolve that make WordPress the world's best loved website builder.
This is the PDF of Susie's presentation: WordPress is 20
What is Wordpress?
There are two versions:
WordPress.com is a website platform that comes with a domain name and web hosting service included in all of its plans. It has limited features and aims to make the website creation process easy for beginners.
WordPress.org is a not for profit organisation run by thousands of volunteers all over the world. It's a highly customizable content management system (CMS) that has a huge selection of themes and plugins that enables the creation of any type of website, from blogs to eCommerce stores. Users need to supply their own domain name and hosting service.
Why is WordPress good for small businesses?
- WordPress is so much more than a CMS. Released on May 27, 2003, WordPress is now over 20 years old and still getting better and better.
- Its open-source code, flexible infrastructure, and huge database of plugins and themes enable developers to use WordPress.org to create any kind of website imaginable, from small personal blogs to complex business websites for the world’s biggest companies.
- For small businesses it's biggest strength is the worldwide army of developers who all use the same free source code and are constantly working on making it better. This means that if the person who built your website isn't available, there will always be someone else who is.
- You can update your website and change its appearance without losing content and you always own your own data. Moving your content away from many other website builders can be tricky and expensive.
- It's very SEO friendly.
- You don't need to know any code.
- New security updates are released often so it's very secure if you keep your site up to date.
What else is unique about WordPress?
Wordpress.org is simply a domain name where anyone can download the free version of WordPress. It isn't a company and its trademark is held by the WordPress Foundation. Its code is open source and constantly modified by hundreds of thousands of volunteers who support the continuing development of the WordPress aim to democratise publishing and make the web a better place.
Automattic is the company set-up by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, to create income, namely through WordPress.com & products like Akismet & WooCommerce. The creation of the WordPress Foundation in 2010, along with the trademark transfer separated the free open-source project from the commercial endeavours of Automattic.
What's Jazz got to do with it?
Each major update of WordPress is named after a famous Jazz musician.
Matt Mullenweg believes that jazz is an art form that shares a lot of philosophical underpinnings with how WordPress is built.
The formula for jazz is Music + Freedom. Jazz can, with intention, be different every time, and unique to every performer and the aim of WordPress is to provide an opportunity for each individual to express their creativity in their own way and evolve a new future.
That sums up WordPress beautifully!
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Read Everything You Need to Know About Websites by Susie Tobias.
Read Why our Network is Like a Jazz Band
Connect with Susie on LinkedIn to get regular updates about WordPress and how to use it for your business.
Why bother with blogging?
Is blogging on your to-do list?
Here's how you can make it a great business tool.
Rachel Extance is an award-winning journalist and blogger. She helps B2B coaches and consultants talk about who they are, what they do, and why their clients need it.
This is her Ask the Expert session for our members.
Do you have a lost and lonely website?
You've built it (or had it built). But you're not sending anyone to it.
Think back... Why did you build your website in the first place?
● To show you're a real business?
● To tell people what you do?
● To tell people more about yourself and your experience?
● To sell your products or services?
I hope so.
So now you've got a website, how often do you send people to it?
Would you like people to be visiting it every day?
Would you like those people to be interested in what you do?
Would you like to be able to show people visiting your website other things they are interested in?
Would you like them to be able to join your email list so you can keep in touch with them?
If so, you want to be blogging.
And you want to publish those articles on your website first.
Why publish on your website first?
- Because your website is your store front, even if you sell services. You want to bring people to your door so they can see what you have on sale. (If you don't have what you're selling on your website yet, come and talk to me about sales pages.)
- Because you own your website. It's not going to close down tomorrow or change the rules on how it works.
- Because blogging is trackable. You can see what people clicked on to come to your website. You can see what they clicked on next. You can track backwards so you can see what they clicked on before they took an action you wanted them to take, like joining your email list or buying from you. If they came from a search engine, you can see what they searched for that led to your website. The more blog posts you have, the more search terms you can rank for, the more people will come to your website.
Ready made material for social media posts
Your blog gives you all the material you need for social media, newsletters and emails. Write your article, publish on your own blog and then carve it up into posts.
If you have 6 articles on your website and you create 5 posts from each, you have 30 days of social media posts. If they are evergreen posts you can put them out in rotation for many months or even years.
What the articles do
● Answer your clients questions
● Enable people to get to know you
● Show your expertise
● Act as a salesperson for you
● Give you space to work out what you think about a topic
Why bother with blogging?
Because more people will know about you, what you do, why you do it, and how they can buy it.
Here are some questions members of Drive The Network asked about blogging
Q. How do you get meaningful information about what people are looking at on your website?
A. If you set up Google Analytics 4, which is going to replace the current version on July 1, 2023, you can ask it to track what actions people take on your website.
There is a webinar from Mary Owusu showing you how to set up Google Analytics 4 . If you would like more help, then Amanda Webb has helpful resources including a course. *
A new development on SEO has just emerged. See: Important News for Google Search
Q. Is there a minimum length for a blog post?
A. No. It needs to be as long as it takes to achieve your goal for it. If you have answered the question, or shared the knowledge you wanted to, then you don’t need to keep on writing for the sake of it. Search engines are not interested in fluff. They want to provide good answers for what is being searched for.
Q. How do you move away from the blank page?
A. AI tools can be very helpful for this. They give you a starting point. Another, more sociable, approach is to ask a business friend to get on a call with you. You can say to them that you are launching a new service and could they ask you questions about it, or that you are refreshing your website copy. It’s a good way to find out what people value about you as well. It’s hard to read the label when you are sitting in the jar. Your friend will do that for you. An AI tool can’t because it doesn’t know you.
Q. What’s one thing you should be doing?
A. Write! Writing is a practice. The only way to get better at it, or feel more comfortable doing it, is to write. Write to one person, and use ‘you’ so they know you are talking to them. Have a clear focus for the article you are writing. Read it through and ask yourself if you stuck to the point. If you’ve gone off topic, cut and paste that material into a separate document so you’ve got it to create another article with.
Get in touch with Rachel:
Rachel Extance offers 1:1 services, both writing for people and helping them to write themselves, and also runs Rachel’s Writing Club. Get all the details at https://extance.co.uk/
- See more articles from Rachel in our Learning Hub:
How to create content when you're short of time
How to structure and plan your business story
How to use storytelling to attract customers
How to pitch a story to a journalist
How do you describe what you do?
Have you got your messaging right?
Whether it's a simple answer to "What do you do?", a value statement, tagline, strapline, boilerplate or website home page, we need to get our message across in as few words as possible and in a way that makes people want to know more.
J Laurence Sarno took our members through this exercise by asking them to answer these three questions:
1. Who is your client and what do they need?
e.g., Technology start-ups who are launching a company, product, or service or who are re-positioning their existing business and need highly targeted communications.
2. What do you do that fulfils this need?
e.g., I use market research to help discover their ideal customer, then write all the communications that will attract that customer, from basic market positioning; to website, blog and social media content; to press materials and sales decks.
3. How do you do it?
e.g., I can work with clients right from market research through to product launch, or only on specific parts of the process.
These basic messages can be the foundation of all your marketing content and everything you say about what you do.
- The common experience of our members was too many ideas about how to answer the three questions, and looking for ways to pare the message down. Laurence has offered Drive members a free 1-1 to get the essential messages right.
- An insight that emerged in more than one conversation was about authenticity and using your communications to first create trust.
- An important point is the 10-second rule for a website home page. In 10 seconds, the visitor should be able to know:
What does this company do?
Am I their target market?
What will be the benefit to me?
Plus, a call to action.
Messaging Workbook
Laurence has made his workbook available in the pdf below:
Messaging Workbook 30 March 2023 (1)
If you'd like help with your messaging, market research or any other marketing messages, get in touch with Laurence at: River Otter Communications.
The Membership Model - an alternative way to sell your services
What's the best way to scale a consultancy, training or coaching business?
Lots of consultants, trainers and coaches scale their businesses by running workshops, training courses and other group activities.
Another way to do this is to use the membership model.
Helen Lindop has been experimenting with various models for a few years and this is why she settled on creating her membership site Speedy Digital:
In 1997 Helen was working for a small software company supplying educational software to schools.
Laptops cost about £2k and her company couldn’t afford one.
The courses weren’t online, Helen had to drive around the country visiting schools where the training material was stored on the individual school servers.
This was pre YouTube, and pre broadband.
A bit of a tech geek, Helen started experimenting with the many different platforms that emerged over the next 20 years. There was so much choice it was hard to work out what was best to achieve her goals of helping small businesses make the most of the tech available to them.
Big learning point 1.
With so much choice available, small businesses were literally swamped with information and often bogged down trying to choose what they needed.
Helen realised that many of them were doing the opposite of what works because they wanted a quick fix and were attracted to the latest shiny idea or silver bullet and empty promises. Figuring out what would really work and setting it up always seemed like hard work in comparison.
Big learning point 2
Over the years of examining social media marketing, inbound marketing, blogging and more, Helen noticed that the most accessible, effective and reliable form of permission based marketing for small businesses was email marketing.
She experimented with on-line training, teaching people how to set up CRMs and email marketing newsletters and campaigns but found that often people preferred to pay her to hold their hand and guide them through the process. She also noticed that very few people who sign up to on-line training courses finish them.
The Membership Model
Unlike an on-line course, a membership model allows for new content to be added over a long period, allowing for and responding to changes in technology as well as the needs of members.
Producing the content live gives instant feedback and interaction and cuts down time “perfecting” pre-recorded video content.
Lots of people who produce on-line learning material feel cut off from their audience and find little satisfaction in selling bundles of digital data to people they never see so the live sessions with her members suits Helen’s style as she likes to talk to people and get to know them over a long period.
Would a membership model suit your content?
Membership can produce a regular income but that can’t be the main reason for doing it. Your content and objectives and members’ needs have to suit the membership model.
Have to set aside time each month, can’t just squeeze it in around other things.
You also have to consider other factors than pure sales numbers and profit e.g. churn rate, lifetime customer value. Might be better to charge less each month and retain people longer than to charge more each month.
The Automatic Customer – John Warrilow – very good book for all subscription models e.g. products and services, not just membership sites.
You don’t have the same urgency as with selling a one-off product either, you have to think harder about selling it.
Can do a single launch a year but then you’re losing all those people who need you between launches. Feels artificial to me because it’s a digital product, there’s no real reason why people can’t join any time. But some people do this well,.
Evergreen vs launch model – several big launches a year vs letting people join at any time.
Platforms
There are others! Here are some other things to think about:
Work out your strategy first – get a list of what you need it to do.
May also need things like an email marketing platform and Zoom on top of this
Price varies depending on features – what can you do without now? What will you need as you grow?
Wordpress is one of the most widely used platforms for all sorts of content. It is infinitely flexible and for that reason you need to be pretty confident with Wordpress and don’t mind fiddling around with plugins and integrations or you need to be happy to pay someone to do that for you, which is likely to cost more than the platforms above when you start out.
A final word from Helen: Check out the Speedy Email Marketing Club and if you need any help contact Helen at HelenLindop.com
Premium Member Profile - Rachel Extance
Rachel Extance is an introvert who helps other people shine!
When Rachel first joined Drive she made it very clear that she wasn’t comfortable talking about herself or being the centre of attention but she loved learning about everyone else.
This was very handy in her career as an award-winning journalist but not a great advantage for someone who was starting a small business and had to find a way of promoting herself and her services.
Six years on and Rachel is still an introvert (we don’t change) but has overcome her reluctance to talk about how she can help other business owners get their messages out to the world so that they can build their own business.
Rachel has run numerous workshops for Drive members on how to write for their business: How to Create Content When You’re Short of Time (this is great fun!); How to Structure and Plan your Business Story; How to use Blogging to Build Your Business; How to Find the Stories that Appeal to your Target Audience. They’re all available in our Learning Hub
Rachel’s Writing Club for coaches and consultants is also proving to be a great success with Rachel’s mentoring and accountability encouraging members to be adventurous with their writing.
The Story Cave is Rachel's place for sharing a love of writing. She describes it as an homage to how humans have shared stories with each other for millennia, a warm and inviting place where people have conversations about all kinds of topics from copywriting to climate change, what they are reading to research. You can get regular updates from the Story Cave by signing up on Rachel's website.
In a world of so much mediocre content we’re very lucky to have Rachel on hand to offer advice and inspiration to our members!
How do you know if what you do is working?
Why is reflecting on our actions so useful?
Do you ever get to the end of the day, the week, the month, the year and ask yourself “What did I achieve?”
Do you just keep doing what you do without stopping to think if its working?
Do you ever feel really pleased with yourself and then beat yourself up for not doing better more often?
Jo Twiselton led a discussion with our members on the value of reflection and how to make it a really useful exercise.
Usefulness of reflection
- When we feel as though there’s barely time to breath, setting aside regular time for reflection can feel like an indulgence but, in a busy day it can be one of the most productive things to do and really helps us decide what to keep doing, what to drop and what to do differently.
- The act of writing something down gets it out of your head and often brings up a solution to a problem.
- A BMW (bitch, moan and whinge) session with yourself can be very therapeutic. Let your inner critic loose!
- You can also ask yourself "What would be even better if …?" (EBI)
- At it’s best reflection can become an act of continuous learning. Approaching things with curiosity and compassion rather than judgement is a great learning process in itself.
- If you have trouble articulating your feelings or emotions (alexithymia), downloading it out of the brain and having to find a word to describe how you’re feeling can be a big breakthrough.
- One of the things that stops us from reflecting is that it can be painful. We all tend to dwell more on what went wrong than on what went right. The ungrateful client always takes up more headspace than the complimentary ones but reflection can re-set the balance and make us aware that we’re putting too much weight on what we could have done better instead of acknowledging all the things we did well.
Reflection and journaling
Some people reflect while they’re doing other things, like gardening, walking, painting, or cooking and may or may not make notes of their thoughts. If you’ve set aside time to reflect and want to use it as a learning process, there are lot of ways to record reflections and the important thing is to find something that suits you and doesn’t become another chore.
Journaling may feel exciting and creative, or daunting and overwhelming. It’s not compulsory and if you do give it a try it doesn’t have to be a work of art!
Having a particular notebook or diary can work well, and using audio notes or apps such as Notion https://www.notion.so/ or Morning Pages https://morningpages.app/ or any of the many other analogue or digital ways of keeping notes may suit you better.
You may like to have a daily, weekly or monthly routine or dip in and out or have someone you check in with to share your reflections and get feedback. Finding what works best for you is important.
A Framework
Gibbs' Reflective Cycle was developed by Graham Gibbs in 1988 to give structure to learning from experiences. It offers a framework for examining experiences, allowing us to learn and plan from things that either went well or didn’t go well.
It covers 6 stages:
- Description of the experience
- Feelings and thoughts about the experience
- Evaluation of the experience, both good and bad
- Analysis to make sense of the situation
- Conclusion about what you learned and what you could have done differently
- Action plan for how you would deal with similar situations in the future, or general changes you might find appropriate.
You can see Jo Twiselton's weekly reflections on LinkedIn
If you have questions or want to share your experiences of reflection as a learning tool, contact us - we'd love to hear from you!
How to prevent those annoying typos.
Do you spot other people's mistakes but rarely see your own?
Annoying isn't it?
You spend ages writing a cracking blog post or LinkedIn article, read it through a couple of times and press post.
A little while later a kind friend sends you a private message to say they just spotted a typo.
Even tho' you know it's there you sometimes still can't see it because you see what you expect to be there instead of what's really there.
That's why we asked our Premium Member, Annie Deakins, to share some proof reading tips with us.
Annie qualified in proofreading with the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) after a career in teaching. She launched her business ProofNow in 2017.
Here are Annie's tips to proofread for consistency in your own writing – for difficult emails, website, social media, blog posts, etc.
First, general tips:
- Read the text aloud.
- Read the text backwards by starting at the end.
- Change the background colour of the text (the default colour white isn’t always helpful).
- Change the font to a serif font.
- Don’t try to proofread everything at once. Read for errors, then read for sense. Do a pass for each element you are checking, e.g. page numbers, headings (big picture); full stops at ends of sentences (small detail).
- Use the ratio 20:20:20 for general eye health – after 20 minutes of work, look away from the screen for 20 seconds, to a distance of 20 metres (e.g. looking out of the window). Your eye muscles will thank you.
- Leave the writing for a couple of days (if you have time) and come back with fresh eyes.
- Know when to stop tweaking. Stop now!
Specific tips about consistency in spelling, punctuation, and context.
Consistency:
It helps to write your own style sheet or checklist.
Annie has a style sheet for her blog Tall Tartan Talks because it helps to remember from one post to another about the style choices she made.
Note: a Style Guide is different to a style sheet. A Style Guide is official guidance published by a publisher or company, e.g. OED, The Economist, etc.
Spelling:
- UK or US English? ise or ize, e.g. realise or realize?
- Use a dictionary to remove any doubt. Apps like Grammarly are popular, but, it might not recognise the wrong word if spelt correctly, e.g. if you write ‘selling’ when you should have written ‘spelling’. ‘Selling’ is correct spelling, so Grammarly won't flag it up as incorrect.
- Are names consistently spelt correctly? Check spelling of place names, if appropriate.
Punctuation:
- UK or US punctuation?
- Oxford (serial) comma, i.e. comma before and (as in my title)?
- Double quote marks or single quote marks? Quotations are found in non-fiction as well as fiction.
- Ellipsis = 3 dots (…) Do insert a space after. Or even insert a space either side ( … ). No need for a full stop if it’s at the end of a sentence. Whatever style of spacing you choose, do it consistently, rather than mix up the number of dots (four here, five there.)
- Choose one kind of punctuation at the end of the sentence without leaving a space.
- One exclamation mark (!) is fine for dramatic purposes. Use sparingly. Two at the end of a sentence is too much.
Context with the bigger picture:
- Is the style consistent: formal or informal? Business-like or chatty? Be yourself, show personality, be rich in content, and readable in blog posts. Stay in style.
- Have you ensured clarity, correctness and convention? Only use jargon if your audience understands it, or you have explained what it means.
- Is the text sound in the case of accessibility, inclusivity and legality?
When you can’t ‘see the wood for the trees’, employ a trained proofreader!
Annie proofreads non-fiction books and children’s fiction and non-fiction.
Find out more about Annie at ProofNow
Premium Members Profile - Charlie Ashley-Roberts
Charlie Ashley Roberts came along to a Drive meeting back in 2017 and said, “I’m in!”
Charlie recognised straight away that our values were aligned, and she’s been an enthusiastic member ever since, running small group meetings in St Neots, UK, where she lives, as well as taking part in other Drive activities and her local community.
After she was made redundant from her role as a pharmaceutical scientist at 3M Charlie trained as a careers advisor and joined the Royal Society of Chemistry, looking after their graduate training programme and then leading the RSC Careers Service. She then launched her own careers coaching business Your Time to Grow. She specialises in supporting women who are in or aspiring to leadership roles who may be feeling lost in their career.
Charlie’s coaching may be career focused but she is also a huge support to everyone in Drive, sharing coaching programmes that help our members make sense of everyday challenges. Her newsletter, podcasts and YouTube videos are all aimed at helping as many people as possible.
We’re all in awe of how much she accomplishes with a busy family life, seemingly effortless multi-tasking and still finding time for vegan baking and an impressive running schedule!
There’s an old saying about busy people always getting things done and it’s certainly true of Charlie. She’s never too busy to help others!
Premium Member Profile - Berenice Howard-Smith
Berenice won three Blue Peter badges for drawing and that was the start of her career!
Berenice (pronounced Ber – e – niece) has an MA in Graphic Design and Typography and runs her business Hello Lovely Design, an award-winning, full creative service for print, book and online design plus image and illustration commissioning, to help those who want design to enhance their work. From small businesses to book publishers (including the world famous Cambridge University Press) Berenice regards each piece of work as an adventure and an opportunity to educate anyone who is interested in the way design makes our life better, easier and more beautiful.
From poetic descriptions of font history, font pairings and the often overlooked “spine design” of books, Berenice shares her knowledge with joy and enthusiasm. Sign up to her newsletter “Gorgeous”to get your share!
Her knowledge of sourcing images, copyright law and printing has saved many a self-published author from a heap of trouble. She has studied inclusive design, making sure that not only is information easily accessible to a wide range of people but that a wide range of people see themselves represented.
As well as sharing the joys of design, Berenice, along with two colleagues, has created a world wide community of people who support those who are childless not by choice, many of whom are enduring the life changing effects of failed IVF.
Berenice was at first hesitant about sharing so much of her personal life but she’s been encouraged by those of us who are keen to learn more so that we can better support friends and family members who are affected, especially the men in these relationships, of whom very little is known or documented.
Learn more about this work at The Full Stop Podcast
Many Drive members are keen to do all they can to help reverse climate change and Berenice is our go-to-person whenever we want to check the claims of eco-friendly products or services. She is unfailingly generous in her support of Drive members and a dedicated collaborator, harnessing and enhancing other people's talents wherever she can.
I'm sure we've got a lot more to learn from her!