Writer and Editor

Neil Macdonald brings a lifetime of elite experience in network television and newspapers to bear on helping clients communicate clearly, concisely, and without clutter. He provides a range of service: C-suite media coaching, strategic and tactical communications advice, polished internal and external messaging, op-ed ghostwriting, and complex board documents.

CLEAR WRITING

A clear, forceful memo commands the conversation. The same can be said for any communication: news releases, internal directives, board briefing documents, messages to shareholders and regulators, policy analyses. We will aggregate and synthesize research into spare, elegant, supremely comprehensible communications. None of the tiresome tropes and insider obscurantism that so routinely render corporate documents unreadable. We provide writing with punch, and clarity. A great idea is of little use if it isn’t effectively conveyed.

GHOSTWRITING

Editors who hold the gate at newspapers, magazines and websites want a smart argument, laid out compactly, in persuasive language. Most of the time, that’s not what they see when they open their emails and go through the day’s submissions. We will provide a crisp polemic that uses flair and logic to build a case in the interest of your business, your campaign or your cause. And do the research, if necessary. And, further, provide advice on how and where to aim the submission for maximum impact. The whole point, after all, is not just to get published, but to persuade the reader.

SHARPENING DELIVERY

The cleverest message or speech will flop if the execution is flat. We’ve all seen it happen. There is an art to speaking at the podium, or for the camera. We can provide bespoke training in how to deliver the speech we write for you. If required, we can also provide guidance on how to perform effectively in interviews or Q&A sessions – how to come away satisfied you’ve delivered your message, rather than sweating over how you sounded or looked. And of course we can sculpt your message in the first place, amping its penetrative power. Basically, we are here to help.

About

Neil Macdonald spent 43 years reporting on politics, wars, elections, revolutions, booms, crashes, coups, and the struggles of ordinary human beings in the unforgiving, bewildering rush of history. He worked as a Parliamentary and foreign correspondent for CBC news for decades, and later as CBC’s national opinion columnist, where he garnered some of the biggest audiences on the website.

He is a faithful practitioner of William Strunk’s famous Rule 13: “Omit needless words. Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

He speaks French, pretty good English, and sufficient Arabic.