Writing, marketing and technology
Everything now is called luxury and VIP, according to Tim Philips, even if it is not. Check out this graph showing press releases mentioning “VIP” over the past decade. Another common misuse is the word ‘exclusive’. If you’re reading this in an advert, it’s not exclusive by definition. Necker Island isn’t exclusive. It’s just expensive. The [...]
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Proofreading can be a time-consuming task. Being a good proofreader requires being thorough and accurate. Letting even a few errors slip through the cracks can be a source of embarrassment for any writer. Since most writers do not want to let proofreading cut into their writing time, finding a balance between speed and quality is [...]
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I like eating out. But I find restaurants are among the worst when it comes to clear communication. For example, I wrote an article ‘Why are restaurant websites so awful?’ a while ago. (The glorious exception is Monmouth Coffee.) Now, I have noticed a trend for restaurants to pack menus with words that no diner [...]
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Listen very carefully, I shall say this only twice… “To get employees to do something, managers need to ask them at least twice,” according to research cited in this month’s Harvard Business Review. Managers are combining different types of communication, such as email, IM and phone calls, to repeat and reinforce key messages. “Managers who [...]
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A question from one of my lovely readers: I am instructor at a local community college. A question has come up: do we capitalize the "e" in eBook when it is the first word in a sentence? I replied: Yes, this is a tricky one. I have a client who sells equipment for eBanking and [...]
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I have spent the past ten years writing daily for different clients, including jet reviews for the Robb Report, computer games stuff for Wired magazine and, for the last five years, corporate work for Microsoft, HP and others. I have had a *lot* of feedback. In this article, I want to distil lessons from that [...]
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“When you advertise fire-extinguishers, open with the fire,” said David Ogilvy. It’s the same with writing.
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This is a guest post from Jonathan Brealey. He is the director and co-founder of Heart Internet web hosting, one of the UK’s biggest web hosting companies. In this post, he outlines some tips for writing a company blog. A company blog can be one of the trickiest forms of marketing – particularly as many [...]
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This is a guest post from Articulate intern, Laura Connell When women write, they write about relationships so it makes sense that women want to feel a connection with the material they read online. Connecting emotionally A survey commissioned by Yahoo and Starcom Mediavest Group (PDF) found that 96 percent of women say that they [...]
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There’s a great article in this week’s Economist about how to detect lies in conference calls. Here are some clues: References to general knowledge (“as you know…”) Overstatement (“fantastic” not “good”) Avoid the word ‘I’, using the third person instead Fewer hesitations Use of swear words (remember Jeff Skilling? I do – I saw Enron [...]
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Matthew Stibbe is CEO of Articulate Marketing and Turbine, the easy, online way to deal with office paperwork. He edits Golf Hotel Whiskey and writes the Forbes Aviator column.
Check out my new, free eBook, 30 Days to Better Business Writing, 71 pages of expert tips and advice to make you a better writer. Available on Kindle, paper and free online.