I’m not unbiased when it comes to Buzzfeed, the Internet-based purveyor of quizzes, listicles and sort-of-news. It’s not that I worked or wrote for them — nothing like that. Basically, I think their content is about 95% useless. How many slideshows about Beyoncé and kittens does the world need? Hand in the Cookie Jar In […]
One of our clients had a bit of a surprise encounter with a Twitter follower a few weeks ago over an email they’d sent. Our client had referred to a user within their target demographic with a generic “he,” pronoun, and the Twitter follower was offended that our client assumed their target demographic was male. […]
I am shocked – shocked! – by the number of poorly formatted web articles and blog posts I come across on a regular basis. Even some of the more polished websites still fail to spend enough quality time ensuring their content is easily digestible and flows intuitively. But there are some simple ways to optimize blog […]
As a copywriter with a degree in English, there are a lot of arcane grammatical rules I have buried away in my head. I’m the type of person who looked up the definition of “split infinitive,” just so I could use it in conversation the next time someone brought up Sandra Bullock (there’s a moment […]
I have an embarrassing confession. When I first stumbled into writing marketing copy 20 years ago, I quite often made use of the words “best” and “only”. I liked them for a lot of reasons: I was lazy It was easy I was under the impression that it’s hard to get sued for using superlatives […]
Anyone who’s worked extensively on copy knows how tough it can be to track the changes made to the piece, who made the changes, and when the changes were made. Luckily, Microsoft Word has some pretty nifty features that make tracking changes simple. Up in the “Review” pane of Microsoft Word 2011 and higher, there […]
The scene: Me, writing a blog post for a client. I pop my head up and call to Jess, who is working diligently on something design-y. “Hey Jess, what about ex post facto?” “Huh?” “For this blog post. Ex post facto. It’s perfect. Can I get away with that?” “Daniel, is that Latin?” “Yeah. But […]