Marketers often stress the importance of a consistent brand voice. Customers want to feel that they are interacting with a coherent entity, even though they understand that many people participate in the business. So we work to develop a distinctive “voice” and style for the brand that carries through all communications. When you work for the same business long enough, you […]
When Marketing Adds Value: The Case for Content
Creative marketing organizations go beyond simply communicating the value they provide. They add value outside the product or service, through content, community, partnerships, and data.” These words seemed almost revolutionary when I wrote them in the book Subscription Marketing. But look around and you can find numerous examples of businesses demonstrating that, when done with […]
Another Book for Writers: The Sense of Style
Does thinking about grammar rules make your eyes glaze over? Here’s a book to unglazed those eyes: The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker. Despite having a formal education in English literature from a fine academic institution, grammar terminology gives me the creeps. Pluperfect, prepositional objects, predictive […]
The Revision Process in the Workplace
Many people know that Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence. You may not realize that other members of Congress edited it. Imagine sending your carefully crafted draft to the United States Congress for revision. When comparing Jefferson’s first draft to the final, it’s clear that many changes led to substantive improvements. That’s what happens when Benjamin […]
Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors [Review]
Do great writers occupy a unique subspecies of the human race? Are their brains wired differently, or are they people who manage to work through the barriers that stump others? In the course of working on my upcoming book on optimizing the writing process, I discovered Sarah Stodola’s wonderful book Process: The Writing Lives of Great Authors. If writing is […]
Writers and the Myths of Creativity
As an English major in college, I carefully avoided any “creative writing” classes in my major. I’d seen friends struggling to churn out short stories on demand and concluded that creative writing was both frightening and stressful. So I stuck to literature while exploring courses in human biology, psychology, journalism, and computer science. When it came it writing, I’d decided […]