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 […]
Book Reviews and Recommendations
One of the greatest gifts someone can give you is a reference to a good book.
I read a large number of books - many as research for the books I write, others just because I love to read them. My topic areas include business and marketing, writing, and cognitive science.
These are links to the book review posts. Visit the Resources pages to find suggested readings for either writing or marketing.
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 […]
A Quick Book Review: Between You and Me
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 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? […]
Check Out the Marketing Book Podcast
Here’s a worthy New Year’s resolution: keep up on the latest in marketing books in 2016 by listening to the Marketing Book Podcast. Bonus: On the January 1st episode, Douglas Burdett and I discuss Subscription Marketing – the book and the practice. Things we discuss: How the sharing economy and Internet of Things are affecting industries of all […]