Category: Beyond the Style Guide
Tips to share with your writing team—or use yourself—for more effective writing.
More Lab Coats, Less Tie-Dye! Branding in Academia
My alma mater, Wesleyan University, is experiencing a branding identity crisis that’s way more amusing than the Gap logo flap (and way more substantive: private-school tuition is a heck of a lot bigger consumer decision than jeans and tees, after all). The alumni network is lapping it up. Rather than recap, I’ll let the principal […]
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
Excuse Your Typos? No I Won’t, Actually
As our fingers fly across our smartphones, we’ve developed a shorthand way to dash off messages without spending too much time on the finer points of spelling and grammar. “C U later” and “gr8” substitute for actual language when we’re communicating via the small screen. Makes you wonder what the great writers would have done […]
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
Crash-Up on the Highway to Helvetica: the Gap Logo Flap
Helvetica is the hip font. So why was it such a crime when the Gap tried to eat lunch with the cool kids?
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
Good Web Housekeeping
Most companies’ websites are a lot like closets. Everything’s dumped in them: data sheets, press releases, brochures, webcasts, and podcasts. Sure, a website is a great way to get your message out to your customers and prospects—the problem is that we leave all these assets out there in cyberspace and forget all about them. That’s why it’s critical to do a bit of tidying up every so often.
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
The 60-Second Copy Lesson
Back in the 90s, it was my voice that told you the Cellular One number you called was out of service. Sorry about that. I was a professional voiceover actor. You may have heard me on radio commercials for Spiegel, the San Francisco Ballet, Brita Water Filters, and Union Bank, and on computer games, including […]
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
A Place for Jargon—and Jargon in its Place
There’s meaningless jargon–and there’s jargon that serves a purpose. What’s the distinction?
Tags
Posted In
Related posts
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 […]