OUR THOUGHTS
Let’s unpack the kind of writing people can’t get out of their heads.
Last week, I spent a couple days in New Orleans for Collision Conference, a tech/startup event with a significant marketing/content component. The conference was sandwiched between the two weekends of Jazz Fest, and as a result we were treated to pop-up...
Writing tutorial: how to identify and edit for passive voice
Last week, I shared a few shortcuts I use to edit my writing for preposition bloat. I started there because cutting prepositions gives you such a strong return on your editing investment – when you go through the steps to fix it, you end up fixing a lot of other...
Writing tutorial: slim down your bloated sentences
Have you ever written something, stepped back, and thought: there’s got to be a better way to say this?Or maybe you always get to that clear, concise, elegant place (you know it when you see it), but it takes you hours.If so, I’ve been in your shoes.But after years of...
Need a confidence boost?
Think of a marshmallow.Puffy. Sugary. Squishy. Sweet.A valuable currency of childhood.At least that was the idea in the late 1960s, when psychologist Walter Mischel performed a series of experiments on preschoolers at Stanford’s Bing Nursery School that later became...
Why I Need Maine
Earlier this month, a GQ contributor who spent four years in Maine for college wrote a piece titled “Maine: do we need it?”First of all, great headline. I had to click. We all did.What I expected on the other side was a satire piece. But what I read felt like a punch...
Does Google judge you when you use poor grammar?
Just yesterday, I was updating my website when a little message popped up from Grammarly suggesting that I add an article (specifically, the or a) before the words source material. Grammarly’s not wrong very often, so I re-read the sentence and asked myself if my...