“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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(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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My challenge for this article: write at an eighth-grade level. Why would I want to do that? Well, to make this easy to read – and understand. It’s the difference between me telling you: Your content is useless if your readers can’t read or understand your message. (grade 7.6 reading level) and The effectiveness…
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If there’s anything we can learn about clickbait, it’s how to capture someone’s attention with just a line of text. But what makes an article a clickbait article? And why are you so compelled to click on one, even though you know you’re just feeding the beast? Good thing you’re here. I’m going to…
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