Writing

A note about Non-Violent Communication

Apr 2025

I read Non-Violent Communication (NVC) after a difficult conversation with a friend last year. I was trying to explain why I didn’t want to go on trips with her any more, and in doing so I upset her. She suggested that I read NVC to be a bit more sensitive in the future, so I did. I found parts of it useful, and parts of it overblown.

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Some of my favourite things from the Government Digital Service

Mar 2020

About the same time I was starting out as a tech writer, I heard of the Government Digital Service for the first time. They were totally overhauling the UK government’s web presence, and they were doing it in the open: sharing what they were trying and what they’d learnt, blogging about their principles. I found their work inspiring - laser-focused on meeting the needs of citizens, on being clear and human-centered.

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A recipe for candied oranges

Dec 2019

This has nothing to do with writing.

There are these sweets I like to make around Christmas. Every year, I forget the recipe I used the previous year, I try to find something helpful online, and I can never find one that’s exactly what I want. So I thought I should probably write it down.

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Editing

Nov 2019

I wanted to write about some of the things I look for when I’m editing. There are a bunch of simple ways to make your writing more readable - and I’m usually thinking about technical documentation, but this can apply to emails and other stuff too.

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Information design for a Slack bot

Apr 2018

One of our developers was trying to make it easier for our colleagues to keep updated on a pull request (PR)’s status, after they’ve reviewed it. This developer was building a Slack bot to do this. I offered to help - it seemed like an interesting information design problem.

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A nice, simple login page

Jun 2016

A page for logging in isn’t a complex idea, but often they’re overdone, overcomplicated, or confusing. So I wanted to call out a nice example with decent writing, from Trello:

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