Writing, marketing and technology
This is a guest post from my pilot blogger friend Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. She writes the excellent Fear of Landing blog and when I read her great new e-book You Fly Like a Woman, I asked her to tell me (and you) about the process of creating it. Having written the book, edited it, formatted [...]
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This is a guest post from my pilot blogger friend Sylvia Spruck Wrigley. She writes the excellent Fear of Landing blog and when I read her great new e-book You Fly Like a Woman, I asked her to tell me (and you) about the process of creating it. I have written some essays, a collection [...]
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This is going to be one of my (hopefully) rare curmudgeon posts. Apologies in advance. I just had an attack of the Victor Meldrews this week. I get very cross when I hear people talk about ‘passion’ in business. Either in mission statements (e.g. Microsoft: “your potential, our passion”) or in CV covering letters (e.g. [...]
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Apparently William F. Buckley forced himself to write 250 words in 15 minutes; writing faster and faster like a sprinter nearing the tape. This anecdote is the start of a great article from Slate magazine about writers’ productivity. There’s an old story about James Joyce. One night he was in a pub with a friend. [...]
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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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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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This is another great guest post from my intern, Laura Connell. According to The Gender Genie, a free online tool that analyses your writing for feminine and masculine keywords, a man has written seven of my eleven Bad Language posts – this post is especially manly. The Gender Genie uses a simplified version of an [...]
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Sometimes a headline needs to be serious: ‘Iran accuses journalist of spying’ and sometimes it needs to be fun: ‘Freddie Starr Ate My Hamster. But in every case it needs to be good. BBC News’ headlines are the best in the world according to web-usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Nielsen’s guidelines state that web headlines must [...]
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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.