More ammo for print

Companies are always looking at print publications with a critical eye, and wondering why they don’t just put the newsletter online and save money. There are plenty of reasons (studies show people retain more after reading print vs. online; it’s harder to...

Oh come on – grass station?

I didn’t know until catching up on my Bloglines feeds and reading Dan Santow’s Word Wise that the 2007 word of the year (named by Webster New World College Dictionary) is grass station. A variation on gas station, it refers to where we may all be fuelling...

Click a good deed

Is this for real? I just found the Free Rice site (through Seth Godin) that has a word game that promises to donate 10 grains of rice through the UN every time you correctly pick the right meaning of a word. It’s an admirable mission, although I wonder just who...

More spam scams to avoid

There’s a new category of scams making the rounds (well, it was new to me): hostile messages supposedly from an eBay buyer saying things like “I want my money back because I did not received (sic) my item until now. I will report you to eBay as fraud if...

More creative words

You know technology has truly infiltrated our lives when tech terms apply to people. A client recently asked what my bandwidth was. It used to mean how much data could be sent through a network or modem, but now it’s evolved to mean “how much extra time do...

Writing is messy

I loved this line, from Daphne Gray-Grant’s “Power Writing” e-newsletter: “Your brain is not a trained seal designed to perform tricks (such as excellent writing) on demand.” Her point was that “perfectly formed prose”...

Relentless verbing

Ugh. While proofreading Big Company’s newsletter the other day, I saw that the CEO talked about competitors having “offshored” parts of their processes. One of my pet peeves is turning perfectly decent nouns into verbs. “Tasking” a group...

Make the most of your freelancers

Ragan just sent me a link to a number of stories, one of which I found particularly close to home: “How to make the most of your freelancers” by Sarah McAdams. (Sorry, link no longer live. But thanks to my western colleague, Dave Traynor, for introducing...

Are you an innerpreneur?

“Innerpreneur.” Isn’t that a great term? I ran across it following a trail from the latest MarketingSherpa newsletter to a book called Karma Queens, Geek Gods & Innerpreneurs, by Consumer Eyes marketing firm founder Ron Rentel. The book...