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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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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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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It’s no secret that emotions are front and centre in marketing. Research shows that it’s emotions that drive our buying behaviour, not rationality, so they’re important to understand. Psychology Today breaks it down: “Advertising research reveals that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a…
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(Mildly NSFW – you’ve been warned!) Much earlier in my career, when I was writing copy for my first corporate website, I suggested a top-level menu label called “Why I need it.” It titled a section that talked about the risks we face when planning for retirement, and how a financial product could help…
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We all have our little writing quirks. Some of us are Serial Capitalizers. Others have a tendency to creationalize new words. Maybe ur more of a txter (k thx). Or write in fragments. What happens when our individual quirks creep onto company websites, blogs or social media? People notice. It can leave your customers…
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