The writing coach

I’m Kate Hulme. I’ve over 20 years’ experience writing for brands and arts & cultural organisations. I’ve set up bespoke training courses for large museums undergoing huge change and small organisations who want to boost skills and morale. I’ve created Style Guides, edited vast amounts of other people’s text and written engaging copy for brands.

Recently I designed and ran a series of writing workshops for the National Army Museum in Chelsea, rolling it out across the organisation and writing a detailed Style Guide for them that was bespoke to their needs. I’ve just finished a course of tailored training courses for The Box in Plymouth, mentoring their staff through writing a huge amount of text to a new tone of voice that I helped them develop. I’ve delivered training for universities and developed tone of voice strategy and writing guides for brands.

I’m a writing nerd. A beautiful phrase fills me with joy, but so does a perfectly placed semi-colon; I almost resisted the urge to illustrate the second point within this sentence.

Coaching gives me the chance to make people feel better about their writing and the opportunity to find pleasure in the occasional utterly brilliant thing they write that I could never have written in a million years.

Technical language

Businesses or arts organisations often have a lot of technical or insider language that’s really familiar to them but obscure to many people outside their front door. They hate writing without it, because it’s become a way for them to prove to everyone they work with that they know what they’re talking about.

But anyone else reading it will immediately think, ‘oh, okay, this isn’t for me,’ and switch off.

I teach them to fold explanations into the text.

First draft: Two young girls take heat from a brazier

Final draft: Two young girls warm up over a brazier of coals

Now there’s just enough extra detail for the reader to understand that a brazier is some sort of coal heater.

Or you can give a small clue without providing a lengthy and comprehensive definition – sometimes we just need to help people feel less lost.

First draft: Local snipe…

Final draft: Waterbirds called snipe…

That’s all I need to know, really.

The ‘insider’ language stays, but the reader’s now an insider too.

 

 

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