You want to update your website, but you can’t carve out the time. You plan to update your blog, but you can’t squeeze out a post more than once every few months. You want to get engagements on social media, but you only have time to log in once a week. You need a writer.…
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It’s no longer enough to be a brand. These days, you also need to be a publisher. That means coming up with a strategy for content, writing it, and posting it on a regular basis. It helps you rise to the top of search results, provide value to could-be and current customers, crank up your…
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Years ago, my hydro company introduced time-of-use billing. The colourful tri-fold brochure they sent my family was all about how electricity would cost more during peak hours, and less during off-peak hours, holidays, and weekends. Curious, like a reader skipping to the last page of a book to spoil the ending, I flipped that bad…
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A picture’s worth a thousand words, but some just raise a thousand questions. If you’ve spent any amount of time searching a stock photo site for an image to pair with your latest article, pamphlet, website banner, or even billboard, you know gems like this inevitably pop up. If you don’t personally search a lot…
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We all make mistakes. That bad haircut you got in high school. Eating that entire box of cookies. Buying those three copies of Time Cop when you were drunk. Getting drunk and shopping online in the first place. As a writer, I have my own list of writing mistakes, whether they’re ones I’ve made…
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I’m an English major. As such, my bookshelves are stacked with style guides, dictionaries, and technical references that most would pawn off at their next yard sale without batting an eye. Not me. Some, I consult on a monthly basis. Some, a few times a year. Others, several times a week. There’s one book…
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Right now, there are 2,823 emojis in the Unicode Standard. The most popular emojis on Twitter as I’m posting this article are 😂, followed by ❤. Over 60 million emojis are sent each day on Facebook. It’s the way people talk in private and public messages, so it makes sense that it’s part of our everyday…
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Emoji Dick isn’t what it sounds like. On September 7, 2010, Fred Benenson released a new take on Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick – rewritten entirely in 736 pages of emojis. It followed a successful Kickstarter campaign and involved the work of over 800 people, who spent about 3,795,980 seconds translating approximately 10,000 sentences…
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You know that feeling when you repeat a word so often it loses its meaning? Try saying “fork” a lot. Look at how it’s spelled. Sound it out. Isn’t it a weird word? Who decided that it’s a proper English word, anyway? The phenomenon is called semantic satiation, and it describes what happens when…
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When I was in grade school, my homeroom teacher gave us a challenge: come up with as many different ways to say “said” as possible. I spent hours that night making a list, determined to write down more than 100 alternatives. Whispered. Uttered. Croaked. Stammered. Replied. Declared. Thundered. Begged. Armed with my trusty thesaurus,…
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