Copyediting for (keen-eyed) dummies
December 13, 2012 § Leave a comment
So, you wanna be a copyeditor? Read my post! Take this course!
The 5 Most Persuasive Words in the English Language | Copyblogger
December 12, 2012 § Leave a comment
The 5 Most Persuasive Words in the English Language | Copyblogger.
As of this writing, this post has nearly 3,000 shares. But if everybody starts using these words, they won’t be so persuasive anymore, will they?
How I Replaced Shakespeare – TIME
December 11, 2012 § Leave a comment
A few weeks back, Joel Stein, TIME’s occasionally hilarious humor columnist, wrote on California’s changing Common Core State Standards. By 2014, Golden State public school students will be reading less literature—and instead, consuming a balanced diet of novels and nonfiction.
Even though Stein’s a nonfiction writer himself, he’s not happy about that. And while I don’t necessarily agree with him (I think we have just as much to learn from great creative nonfiction as we do from Faulkner and Fitzgerald), for me, this statement rang true:
The first time I write in a new format–travel essay, screenplay, apology e-mail–I read a bunch of examples. But when I want my writing to improve, I read something that forces me to think about words differently: a novel, a poem, a George W. Bush speech.
As writers, it’s so easy to get stuck in our own ways, our tried-and-true manners of speech. That’s why we should always be in search of the new, the undiscovered—fiction and nonfiction included.
And of course, even as educators seek to strike a balance between the two, fiction will never really go away. As Stein points out,
Fiction also teaches you how to tell a story, which is how we express and remember nearly everything. If you can’t tell a story, you will never, ever get people to wire you the funds you need to pay the fees to get your Nigerian inheritance out of the bank.
And that’s a life skill we can all use. To read the rest of Stein’s article, (TIME subscribers only, sorry), click here.
Hey, I Need to Talk to You About This Brilliant Obama Email Scheme – Alexis C. Madrigal – The Atlantic
December 6, 2012 § Leave a comment
Image via Larry Marano at WireImage/Getty Images, published in August in New York Magazine.
If you were on Obama’s mailing list this election season, you’re surely familiar with his relentless emails, with subject lines like “Hey,” “This week,” “Thank you, Mary,” and “Hey.”
No, the poor interns tasked with composing these messages weren’t too glued to the polls to dream up jazzy, eye-catching headlines. Team BO had done its research. Throughout the campaign, strategists created multiple versions of each message, using analytics tools to determine which iterations got opened, generated clicks, and inspired donations.
The campaign’s now-characteristic personable, no-frills tone was what readers responded to best. But the most important thing analysts learned: a good idea is only good for so long.
Says the Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal:
In my experience in the content game, nothing has proven more true. Any detailed social media primer I give you would be out of date by the time I could finish writing it. Any operational headline writing strategy would stop working if everyone used it. Everyone clamoring for your attention on the web is trying to strike that perfect mix of familiarity and novelty. And that means the content techniques that work are necessarily recursive. You change what people like by doing whatever you do. Which then requires that you do something else, which then changes their tastes again.
…Sometimes, I start to think of the Internet as a gatheration of starlings, each reader/writer moving in response to her immediate content environment, and somehow the whole thing seems to move together, following a million different versions of the same core set of rules.
But hey, if it works (even if only for a moment), go with it. Read the rest of the article here.
Take a cue from the greats
November 26, 2012 § Leave a comment
Need some quick inspiration for writing? Read The Longform Guide to Writing Great Nonfiction, a collection of essays on the writing process and craft. Who says you can’t get a little creative boost while you procrastinate?
MARY GABLE 