Editing

The art of feedback: 12 essential lessons

by Matthew Stibbe on May 18, 2011

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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Word bloat and privacy policies

by Matthew Stibbe on May 18, 2010

How many words do you need to say ‘we will protect your privacy’? Five if that is your real intention. However, if you want to make money, you need a lot more, as these graphics from the NY Times show. (Hat tip: Steve Clayton.)

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10 ways to slim down obese copy

by Matthew Stibbe on April 15, 2010

Shorter, punchier copy is more readable and more memorable than obese copy. You can test this in your own life. Why do we like top ten lists, for example? The claim is also supported by experimental data; such as Jakob Nielsen’s research. So how do you put your copy on a diet? Zap filler text. [...]

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When writing, optimise the algorithm not the code

by Matthew Stibbe on February 15, 2010

Back when I used to be a programmer, I quickly learned that you could get a much bigger performance boost by changing the algorithm – the underlying structure of the code and data – than by optimising the code. For example, you could rewrite an inner loop in assembler rather than C and get a [...]

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Rules of thumb for writing

by Matthew Stibbe on July 10, 2006

There are different, competing claims about the origin of the term ‘rule of thumb‘. I prefer the idea that it stems from the fact that the length from the tip of the thumb to the knuckle is about one inch (or if you’re a pilot and you use 1:500,000 charts, about 10 nautical miles). In [...]

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