So you have to write a blog post. You have a pretty good idea of what you want to write about, but there’s just one problem: the last time you strung words together for something that wasn’t an essay or a business document, you were a couple of feet shorter and maybe a little…
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The other night, I found myself in the middle of a chair dancing class. “Y’all are so extra!” said the instructor. “Let’s start from the top, yas?” Internally, I high-fived myself for understanding the new slang. At the same time, I realized that I was self-high-fiving because I’m about ten years older than she…
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The Sunday before my internship began, I drove to St. Thomas, Ontario for the first time. Right where the highway turns into the city’s main street, I was greeted by the business end of a local landmark: a statue of Jumbo the elephant. A few turns later and I was in the empty parking…
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“How many ways can a man tell his sweetheart, ‘I love you?’ “Nothing says ‘forever’ like up to 6.4 terabytes per second . . . and nothing says ‘I love you’ like six times the mobile backhaul capacity.” That’s part of the voice over for an ad for Cisco’s ASR 9000 router – “the…
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You’ve spent months doing user research for your product. You understand your market and you know exactly who you’re targeting, what they’re looking for, and how to reach them. Here’s the catch: no matter how thoroughly you know your audience or how perfect your messages are, you’ll still miss out on over 10% of…
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You can smell some false marketing promises from a mile away. There are singles in your city waiting for you to call! This woman figured out the secret to easy weight loss – and doctors hate her! Make $1,000 a day without leaving your house! We see messages like this all the time, on…
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On-brand but completely fresh. Customer centric. Churning anomalies. Sound like your last quarterly meeting? Nah. These are the first three phrases that came out of a lorem ipsum generator for office-speak. I think we’ve read our fair share of pleas to ban corporate buzzwords from our office vocabulary in favour of good ol’ plain…
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There’s a lot that goes into a good piece of writing. Technique, structure, word choice, flow – the list goes on. But it all centres around two main goals: it gets our ideas across, and it makes others care about them. Last week I talked about how writers build good roads to help our ideas…
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You have an amazing idea. Your product can change the world. Your service will make life so much easier. But none of that matters if you can’t communicate about it. Think about what our words accomplish: at the most basic level, they take idea from your head and put it into the head of…
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Let’s get real for a second and talk about getting real. There’s something in writing called authenticity, and it refers to how true we are to our voices (and those of our characters). The basic tenets are “know thyself,” and letting your humanity – personality, thoughts, experiences, passions, strengths, and vulnerabilities – flow through…
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