Have you ever wanted to argue with a copy editor’s deletion of a hyphen? Do you have strong feelings about using commas for cadence? If so, you’ll love reading Mary Norris’ Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. The book dedicates entire chapters to gendered pronouns, hyphens, apostrophes, and—yes—commas. It sheds light on The New Yorker‘s copy editing styles, including its […]
The Zeigarnick Effect, or the Pull of the Unresolved
It happened again the other night. I watched a television show that concluded with a surprising twist. Later that night and the next morning, the show kept popping into my thoughts, as I pondered different ways the plot might resolve. Ah, the magic of the cliffhanger. Televisions writers know that a fresh, unresolved plot point keeps […]
Finding Flow in the Writing Process
“Not an early start today but it doesn’t matter at all because the unity feeling is back. That is the fine thing. That makes it easy and fun to work.” – John Steinbeck. The unity feeling – you know what Steinbeck means, don’t you? Have you felt it? The writer Zadie Smith describes a state of magical […]
Nine Circles of Subscription Hell
Sometimes revenge is best served in literature. The poet Dante Alighieri, powerless against the forces that had exiled him from his native Florence, populated his vision of hell with proxies for his enemies. The resulting epic poem has become a masterwork in Italian literature. If only politics were so literate today! Dante’s Inferno describes nine […]
The Quest for the Perfect Book Title: A/B Testing
Which would you rather drink? Simple A/B testing. The right blog or book title can be the difference between your writing earning a few moments of consideration and passing immediately into oblivion. If your blog post, article, or book needs to find an audience in the larger world, an effective title or headline is critical. The […]
The Science of Value Nurturing and Happy Customers
Do you measure Net Promoter Score or customer loyalty? Are you tracking customer retention and engagement? Each of these metrics attempts to answer the same fundamental question: how happy people are being customers. For all of the effort we spend measuring and monitoring these metrics, it’s worth considering the deeper question of human motivation. What makes people happy about spending money? […]