The Devil’s Marketing Dictionary
I’ve been thinking about the real meaning of the words I hear every day. If you like this, please comment with new terms you want me to define or indeed add your own definitions. Return on investment. An imaginary number that is equal to or greater than the cost of purchasing a solution. Best practices. [...]
10 top tips on using quotations
Quotations can make an article, press release or case study real or they can make them deathly dull. As a writer, it’s your choice. You have complete control over how you quote people and a few simple techniques can make all the difference. Go to the top. One reason to include a quotation is to [...]
What can writers learn from menus?
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 [...]
The art of feedback: 12 essential lessons
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 [...]
Working with writers
Clients occasionally tells us horror stories about working with writers (not us, of course!). Missed deadlines, bad writing, insufficient research even plagiarism have been mentioned. Here are our tips about selecting writers and making sure that you have a great relationship with them. Apply them to Articulate as well. Selection Look for writers with a [...]
Seven types of bad writing
Everyone can write. But not everyone can write well. We all learn to write at school but then society makes a distinction between ‘writers’ and ‘the rest of us.’ A writer sits in a garret and writes the great American novel. The rest of us write memos. It’s a false division. Because everyone can write, [...]
10 ways to slim down obese copy
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. [...]
