When it comes time to develop a new website, companies and organizations spend a lot of time agonizing over what the site should be like. They consider all sorts of different designs and spend hours trying to get the functionality exactly where they want it. They make list after list of possible pages.
And then, they just slap some content in place.
I once worked for an advertising agency at which every logo design and brochure had to pass an incredibly difficult test. At the end of the workday, one of the partners would put the piece in his briefcase, bring it home, and show it to his wife. As a result, we produced a lot of work that looked alike, usually using the same two or three colors (which I assume also dominated their home’s décor).
You might chuckle at the idea of a high-powered advertising executive basing his decision about what was best for client needs on Mrs. Executive’s personal likes and dislikes, but are you guilty of the same approach?
Of all the lessons I learned in my college days — at least of the ones I’ll admit to in a public post — one of the most important was the value of rewriting. A first draft is just that — the first shot at getting everything organized on the paper (or onscreen). Rewriting gives you the opportunity to refine and improve what you’ve done.
Sometimes, people ask how many times they should rewrite something, and my answer is always the same: however many times it needs. That’s not a flip answer. At times, one rewrite is enough to make something work, while other words might need to be trimmed and polished a dozen times.
After all the uproar about Coca-cola employing a commercial in which immigrants sang “America the Beautiful” in their native languages instead of English (as the grandson of immigrants, I found it touching, beautiful, and far more patriotic than the outcry), it occurred to me that most people mistakenly believe that Americans share a common language.
I learned that lesson as a child when my family was vacationing in New England. We sat down at a lunch counter, and the friendly man asked me what I wanted to drink. I asked him what kind of pop he had, and he looked confused. I repeated my question, and he genuinely asked, “What’s pop?” Surprised at his ignorance, I replied, “You know, like Coke, Pepsi …” and he grinned and said, “Oh, you mean soda!”
To some people, worrying about misspellings and typos is a foolish waste of time. They brush it off as some kind of annoyance or a miniscule matter that isn’t worthy of their attention — and they regard writers, editors, and others who do their best to spot and eliminate those mistakes as “anal retentive.”
My favorite analogy for typos is the sales rep who shows up in a perfectly tailored Armani suit with a dazzling silk tie and a smile to match. His sales pitch is perfect and his product is worthy of your business. But this poor fellow enjoyed a corned-beef sandwich at lunch, and he didn’t notice when a dab of mustard dribbled off the sandwich and onto his tie.
We’ll continue our ongoing series of typos, wrong words, misspellings, and other goofs with a look at three embarrassing mistakes by media professionals who were covering education issues. There’s a particular sense of unease when mistakes creep into education coverage (or, for that matter, when materials created by schools contain mistakes).
Eagle-eyed typo spotter Steve Gutermuth shared one from the Johnson County Daily Journal. The January 19 headline for an online story on local results of Indiana’s school evaluation system read “After grades drop, school puts pencil to pape.” We’ll assume that will improve its grad.
It’s often said that death is the only fear greater than being forced to speak in public. Fortunately, most people only die once, but you may face multiple occasions in your career or civic activities in which you’re forced to get up and speak.
There are many folk cures for reducing the anxiety associated with speaking. Some recommend that you pretend your audience failed to dress themselves. My Midwestern upbringing means the thought of speaking to a large group of naked people only makes me more nervous, so I had to find a better way to overcome those fears. And I did.
I was working in an ad agency that landed a plum client: a Fortune 500 company’s new air-cargo startup. It was a great opportunity, because it was a high-visibility business that literally needed everything from the ground up — every brochure, every sign, every name badge, you name it.
It also needed something that was a dream project for graphic designers: a livery for its fleet of airplanes. As one of those people who can’t help but look up every time an airplane passes, I thought that was pretty cool. Then I saw the design proposals and said “uh-oh.”
Too many people think the secret to a great presentation is a dazzling PowerPoint presentation. Not quite. Whether you’re an occasional presenter or a seasoned pro, the answer is the same as the punch line to that tired joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?”
It’s practice, practice, and more practice, pure and simple. The people who deliver presentations that seem to be so natural and casual are usually those who have practiced the most.
We live in a nation that simultaneously idolizes, fears, and holds contempt for members of the legal profession, depending upon how we and they are situated at any particular moment. One odd side effect of that relationship is a desire to imitate attorneys in an effort to make ourselves appear to be smarter.
You’ll see it when executives try to draft legal-style language or when ad writers try to pen their own small print. You’ll also see it when people borrow elements of contracts, such as that odd habit of spelling out numbers and then showing the numerical value in parentheses, which I notice thirty-one (31) times in the average day.