If you’ve ever flown Southwest Airlines, you know that their corporate image is about having fun and embracing the inner goofball, while seriously and professionally moving you from point A to B. Witness the singing flight attendants, the gate agents that crack bad jokes, and the former CEO who challenged a competing exec to an [...]
Author Archive: Chris
Executive Blogs Need to Mix It Up to Lure Readers
The problem with CEO blogs, said marketing guru Seth Godin several years ago, is that they rarely have the qualities that make for engaging reading: candor, urgency, timeliness, pithiness, and controversy. “Does this sound like a CEO to you?” Godin asked. Well, no—for the most part, executive blogs are pure vanilla, and at worst, simply [...]
Snuffing Out Deadly Dull Buzzwords
At the height of the dotcom era, a few high-tech journalists created “Buzz Saw,” an email filter that would bounce messages from PR and marketing people who larded their pitches with overused buzzwords. If you laid it on too thick with catchphrases like “bleeding-edge,” and “strategic paradigm,” not only did your email get bounced, but [...]
Fun with Newspaper Corrections
From The New York Times, December 24, 2009: “A picture caption with an article in some editions on Tuesday about continuing transportation problems after the weekend snowstorm misidentified the location of a pile of slush in the Bronx. It was on Fordham Road, not Fordham Avenue.” Anyone else share my love of journalism corrections—especially fabulously [...]
Speech-Crafting Lessons from the White House
Regardless of where you fall on the political spectrum, it’s hard to deny that President Obama has brought powerful speech-giving back to the White House. Much of the credit goes to Obama himself. The award-winning author is heavily involved in the drafting of his speeches—and packs a punch with his delivery. It is also clear [...]
The very best style guide reference books
If you’ve read the fabulous Grammar Queen’s post on creating a corporate style guide (and if you haven’t read it, do so right now), you know you must make some decisions about how your organization crosses the t’s and dots the i’s. However, you can’t possibly list every grammar or style rule in your own [...]
“After Deadline,” The New York Times
If you want to learn how to write clean copy, fast and under the gun – for marketing or any other arena where clarity is valued – the best training is in a big-city newsroom. (Assuming there are any such jobs left in journalism, but that’s another story.) Those of us lucky enough to have [...]
USA Today
USA Today. McPaper. The newspaper with the cutesy graphics and not much copy. The one you trip over when you leave your hotel room, and the one you take from the flight attendant when they’ve run out of the Times or the Journal. USA Today gets no respect. Agreed, it’s nowhere near as satisfying a [...]
