I expect What's In It For Me (WIIFM), to be crystal clear. And your customers do too. Once way back when, I expected less — and you probably did too. That was a time before women entered the workforce and the ranks of business owners in large numbers, before immigration and demographic trends changed the [...]
Good change strategy means avoiding the bad words and message mistakes that trigger frames running counter to the positive social change you want to see.
In a previous post I wrote about how the changing media landscape has turned us into consumers of bits and bytes of information. And consumers don’t have time (or want to take time) to wade through volumes of information. Your readers want quick takeaways and give you only a fleeting opportunity to grab their attention. In this [...]
Visual Thesaurus: Mindmap of Withdraw Words are a year-round pleasure, but with November's shorter days and longer nights, words seem to take on added significance — and heightened pleasure. Word candy seems an apt description. I find myself eager for wordplay and freshly appreciative of masters and scholars of language. Words, nuances and [...]
Thoughts on the psychology of words, word use, pronouns, and social issues have been scurrying across my brain lately.
There is certainly nothing like a blog post on grammar to get a group of communicators going! Recently, on Spin Sucks, a favorite PR blog of ours, Gini Dietrich posted 12 grammatical errors that we’ve all probably made at some point in our lives. In the comments section, I added my own grammar pet peeve [...]
Nugget. In today’s world of writing brief “nuggets” of information, some people may not care or think solid writing skills are important for digital delivery. I would argue, however, that quality writing is now more critical than ever. Quality writing can be an opportunity to help your peers, colleagues or friends evaluate your message. In [...]
