A local food retailer undergoing a major renovation apparently intended to plead for patience on a social media site, but wound up asking for participation in a nudist event. The retailer’s post asked customers to “please bare with us,” which is actually asking them to disrobe. Clearly (I hope), the store wanted customers to “bear” […]
One of my most successful projects began when I received an assignment to rescue a doomed newsletter for companies providing towing services to a motor club’s members. The newsletter wasn’t being read and the motor club didn’t understand why. It was full of valuable and important information, but nobody seemed to be paying attention, and […]
What’s the objective for your new website? “We want it to have a cool design that will attract visitors.” If I had a dollar for every time I heard that, I probably wouldn’t have to write as many websites to pay my mortgage. And each time I hear it, I have to take a deep […]
There’s a common misconception about what people like me do for a living: that when our fingers make that initial contact with the keyboard, brilliance flows forth, creating first drafts that are truly works of art. The reality is quite different. If you read my typical first draft of copy for an article, a website, […]
Thanks to a handy tool within Microsoft Word and most other word processors, it’s easy to make your writing tighter and more powerful. That handy tool is the Word Count indicator. And here’s how you can use it to improve your writing: highlight whatever it is that you’re writing, whether that’s a page or a […]
About what you say in your marketing materials, that is. I wish that weren’t the case, but it’s absolutely true. I may spend hours trying to get a paragraph just right, even though I know that the audience is only going to glance at it for a couple seconds. You’d never know that from the […]
Again and again, I see proof of professional reliance on spellcheckers instead of good old proofreading and editing. Case in point: a Northwest Indiana Times article about funding for safety improvements on the South Shore Railroad. The reporter included this bullet point: “Implementation of Positive Train Control, a federally mandated safety system that tracks the precise location […]
Whether mistakes are just amusing, horribly damaging, or simply embarrassing, they don’t belong in your marketing communications materials. That’s why proofreading is so important. That said, there’s a certain kind of error that proofreaders miss more often than any other … and it’s quite embarrassing (well, not as much as substituting a call-in sex line’s […]
They can be painful. Of course, I’m referring to arguments about whether it’s okay to use those delightful little word combinations we call contractions. You know them: cannot becomes can’t, will not shortens to won’t, and so forth. When professional writers insert those handy contractions into copy, it often gives birth to a strange reaction […]
Strip and stripe are two words that look similar and are pronounced differently. More important, they convey strikingly different meanings. And yet both and their derivatives are constantly being used incorrectly by people who don’t know better. If you see a Facebook post selling a “striped” piece of furniture, it means one of two things. […]
