Ten years ago, I was among the editors and grammatical hard-liners who fought against using pronouns such as they, them, and theirs as singular. I insisted, “They is plural! It can only apply to two[...]

Chances are, you learned the importance of proofreading somewhere between middle and high school after getting a marked-up essay back from your teacher. There, scrawled in red pen at the top of the[...]

Paradoxically, the most effective way to alleviate chronic or toxic stress is not to retreat from stressful conditions but to sink deeper roots so that you can once again rise above the little[...]

Maybe you are new to the proposal writing world. Or maybe you have years of experience and have (begrudgingly?) written several. Or maybe you enjoy the challenge of proposal writing and just don’t[...]

“You’ve got mail!” Remember when getting an email was exciting? Now our inboxes are stuffed full. How can you make your marketing email be the one that gets noticed—opened—and clicked through? 

“So, what do you do for work?” When I share that I work as an instructional designer for a business communication company, I brace myself for what frequently happens next. “So…” awkward pause, “What[...]

As I sat down to watch another episode of Bridgerton, I started thinking about Microsoft Office apps—because that’s an entirely normal thing to do while watching a period drama series. When it comes[...]

The importance of symbiotic relationships

Maintaining strong relationships with your clients provides two-way benefits—especially when much of what you do as a vendor requires being a part of your client’s team. Connections supported by[...]

Great contractors can do wonders for a business, but a contractor can only be as effective as their client partnership allows. Part of making that partnership work falls to you—to have a great[...]

Just flirting with the idea? At the end of this blog, you’ll be saying “yes” to alt text. What is alt text? Alt text is short for alternative text. It’s used to convey the meaning of non-text[...]

Just as important as your brand, your writing style—tone, common abbreviations, punctuation usage, etc.—provides a consistent voice for your business. But who owns your company’s writing style? Maybe[...]

Many articles describe how to overhaul your LinkedIn profile to get a new job or increase exposure within your industry. But what if you just want to tidy things up a little? Whether you are a new[...]

This year raised a lot of questions. Like, “How long have we been breathing in each other’s air droplets?” and “What’s a murder hornet?” As we look back on a year that shook us (literally, thanks to[...]

Adding narration to an eLearning course creates depth and energy that complements the course’s content. Professional voice-over actors understand the ins and outs—from the preparation through a[...]

Being consultative can sometimes feel like a lesson in mind reading. While we aren’t magicians at McMul, we are dedicated to making our clients’ lives easier. For example, we recently came up with a[...]

The Utah Poison Control Center (UPCC) had a dilemma. They had a great training, built in Adobe Flash, that had been in service since 2010. The content, theory, and instructional design had yielded[...]

Keep Cash in Your Pocket If you’ve got a highly variable workload, outsourcing can save you money, allowing you to pay for work as it comes. Since the cost of the work is proportional to the amount[...]

“Should I show my learning objectives at the beginning of my training?” Many people are asking this as the practice of explicitly stating learning objectives becomes less popular. Does this mean[...]

Being an editor or writer is like being a gardener of words. I weed sentences, cultivate paragraphs, and landscape pages. That’s why I think it’s easier to visualize the undertaking of a[...]