Archive for the ‘Writers’ Category
Wednesday, February 1st, 2012
Some people know how to coin a memorable phrase.
Tom Brokaw referred to the men and women who fought for the United States in World War II as the greatest generation. In 1943 a Nazi propaganda periodical used the term Iron Curtain. Tea Party members often refer to journalists the media elite, a term coined by S. Robert Lichter and two other researchers in a 1980 study and subsequent book by that name. Former Vice President Spiro Agnew launched a salvo from White House speechwriter William Safire when he called the media “nattering nabobs of negativism.”
Then there’s the 1984 TV ad campaign for Wendy’s with Clara Peller yelling “Where’s the beef?” a refrain that might ring true in today’s politicized climate.
Not all pithy expressions involve cheap shots at journalists and competitors. Many encapsulate the issues like a good joke. The phrase “a picture is worth a thousand words” is attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece in the early part of the 20th century on the effectiveness of graphics in advertising. The term senior citizen first appeared as a euphemism for older people during a 1938 American political campaign.
Richard Nixon referred to citizens who weren’t protesting against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War the silent majority. Plato said necessity is the mother of invention, a phrase that must have appealed equally to Nixon and Frank Zappa, although for different reasons.
Contemporary authors are doing an equally good job in characterizing trends. People who follow us on social networks are called peeps. People who follow us on Twitter are Tweeps. Microbloggers live in the Twitterverse.
PIMCO Bond fund manager Bill Gross has called the post-2007 mortgage debt environment of high volatility and low returns the New Normal. Writing for hospital administrators at H&HN Daily Bill Santamour called the wave of retiring baby boomers who will need healthcare the Silver Stampede. And there’s the term baby boomer itself, a term coined by Landon Jones in his book Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation.
What’s your favorite line?
Tags: baby boomers, Bill Gross, Bill Santamour, Clara Peller, cliches, elderly, euphemism, Frank Zappa, Greatest Generation, H&HN, idiomatic expressions, Iron Curtain, nabobs, peeps, phrases, PIMCO, Plato, politicians, politics, quotes, Richard Nixon, sayings, senior citizens, silent majority, Silver Stampede, Spiro Agnew, Tea Party, Tom Brokaw, Tweeps, William Safire
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Nonfiction, PR, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Friday, January 20th, 2012
More than half of America’s biggest PR firms say revenue and headcounts rose last year over 2010.
According to the Council of Public Relations Firms, which represents more than 100 of America’s leading public relations agencies, 70 percent of firms report that final 2011 revenues will be higher than in 2010. Only 13 percent anticipate lower revenues. Growth is coming from the consumer product, healthcare and energy sectors.
More than a third of those firms anticipate higher budgets in 2012. Some 60 percent report increased headcounts at the end of 2011. About three-quarters of firms expect an increase in social media services while more than a third expect growth in business-to-business, corporate communications and issues management.
The council notes one other trend for 2012: 57 percent of its agencies foresee partnering with outside firms to expand their capabilities.
Tags: 2012, B2B, business to business, corporate communications, Council of Public Relations Firms, economy, forecast, growth, media relations, PR, public relations, survey, Writing
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, PR, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Friday, December 16th, 2011
The Associated Press has released software that uses the AP Stylebook to proofread content in Microsoft Word.
AP StyleGuard provides automatic checking of documents for AP style. The software uses defined structure and rules similar to Word’s spelling and grammar checking. AP says the plugin ensures consistency and saves writers the time spent manually referring to the AP Stylebook. The rules will updated throughout the year.
The software is only available for PCs at this time. It will cost $59.99 for a one-year subscription. Until its general launch on April 1 the plugin is available for an introductory rate of $49.99 a year.
Tags: AP, Associated Press, correction, grammar, Microsoft Word, plugin, spelling, stylebook, styleguide, Writers, Writing
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
You think writers are the only ones concerned with telling a story? Listen to this.
Earlier this month three of six agency owners and recruiters interviewed by blogger Arik C. Hanson said the ability to tell a story was the leading trait they want to see in PR professionals. They believe storytelling reflects the facility to identify themes and execute a strategy. Yet when many of their peers screen applicants, they ask for experience that exactly matches the job they’re offering. They’re focused on the product, not the process, like the ability to build social networks, negotiate for information or get along with others.
For those in marketing communications, here’s the wake-up call: financial planners have discovered the power of story. In a column for MarketWatch, MIT’s AgeLab Director Joseph Coughlin said the traditional model of financial planning won’t work in these unsettling times. Neither will an appeal to reason through a recitation of statistics. He believes advisers who tell stories that elicit emotion and inspire people to act will achieve greater success–for their clients and themselves.
“We’ve got to be good storytellers to get that emotion, to make us relevant, responsive and realistic for what the consumer needs today to plan for tomorrow.”
Let’s hope the people who hire are willing to make that investment.
Tags: communications, hiring, hiring managers, interviews, jobs, Marketing, PR, public relations, Writing
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Nonfiction, PR, Social media, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Monday, November 7th, 2011
Writing that flows is often based on a solid structure.
Take the piece “Why impulse spending can be a good thing” by Katherine Rosman, who writes the Checks & Balances column about finance and marriage for the Wall Street Journal. The article is designed to read like a short story with comments, unfolding through scenes with increasing drama. We want to determine what happens between Rosman and her husband Joe, who in their struggles to mesh their opposites-attract financial styles have become persons of interest.
The article is structured in three parts. The first details a recent event, the second one that took place a while ago, the third the night the two met. All involve charity auctions. All create an orderly march backward in time, from a seemingly frivolous exchange to a defining moment. Each segment seems ordinary yet together they build toward a quiet but profound insight you’d see in the work of Anne Tyler or Anna Quindlen.
The parts consist of anecdotes, all of which bring to life the article’s theme—that contrary to popular wisdom occasional impulse spending can provide rewards to even the most budget-minded couples. Those mini stories also illustrate a greater wisdom: we can argue about spending but what we really value is not the behavior but the relationship. The real prize isn’t the money, it’s the person.
When I worked as a writing coach for a newspaper owned by the publisher of the Wall Street Journal I studied briefly with the great Roy Peter Clark. Now vice president of the Poynter Institute, Clark taught us to use the tools of fiction writers while rigorously adhering to the facts. Structuring a story that way is more than playing dress-up. It’s a process to present and order events with all of the immediacy and emotional resonance of direct experience.
It’s good to see other non-fiction writers have adopted the storyteller’s technique. Using those tools, Rosman ratchets up the conflict between spouses with a deceptive calm that shows rather than tells about their relationship. The story flows without effort. Even the ending feels natural, a surprising valentine to financial and emotional conservatives everywhere.
Talk about impulse control.
Tags: auction, budget, budgeting, charity, Checks & Balances, column, control, couples, form, impulse buying, Katherine Rosman, marriage, opposites, spending, structure, struggle, Wall Street Journal, Writers, Writing
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Nonfiction, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
Two contemporary American authors recommend themselves for their use of the English language, mystery writer Will Thomas and poet Barbara Hamby. They have little in common. Their subject matter and style don’t match. Yet each handles the language with vigor and grace without sacrificing the forward motion often missing in literary works.
In the five novels in which he chronicles the adventures of Cyrus Barker and his assistant Thomas Llewelyn, Thomas writes at a studied rate that matches the pace of the Victorian England he portrays. As narrator, Llewelyn describes action with a sharp ferocity, which is to be expected in mysteries and thrillers. It’s in the descriptions and transitions that the author shines, passages that in lesser hands would read as filler, or asides.
Here Llewelyn describes Irish beauty Maire O’Casey in Thomas’s second book in the series, To Kingdom Come: “With her hair pulled back loosely, she looked fresh out of one of the paintings by the fellow Renoir, who obviously had a passion for redheads. A jolt of electricity ran down my spine as if I were a tree trunk split in half.”
Poet Barbara Hamby abandons quiet passion for the full-throated kind. Here’s the beginning of her tour de force, “Mambo Cadillac,” from her book All-Night Lingo Tango:
Drive me to the edge in your Mambo Cadillac,
turn left at the graveyard and gas that baby, the black
night ringing with its holy roller scream. I’ll clock
you on the highway at three a.m., brother, amen, smack
the road as hard as we can, because I’m gonna crack
the world in two, make a hoodoo soup with chicken necks,
a gumbo with plutonium roux, a little snack
before the dirt-and-jalapeño stew that will shuck
the skin right off your slinky hips, Mr. I’m-not-stuck
in-a-middle-class-prison-with-someone-I-hate sack
of blues.
Remind you of the early short stories of T.C. Boyle? You can hear Garrison Keillor read “Mambo Cadillac” on The Writers Almanac and Hamby’s own reading for the Southeast Review in Tallahassee, available from the iTunes store.
If you like a little kick to your writing, you’ll want to ride with these two.
Tags: Barbara Hamby, Cyrus Barker, librarian, mystery, Novel, poet, slam, suspense, Thomas Llewelyn, Will Thomas
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Fiction, poetry, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Wednesday, October 5th, 2011
The shovel blade bites into the earth, black with rain and rot. It tangles with roots and rocks. The sun slants across the rising mound of dirt. Mosquitoes hover like angels of death.
We wrap Jenna in her favorite towels that feature a smiling sun, a baseball team’s logo, a lobster at the beach. Lifting her from the carpet she seems heavy and stiff. I trudge up the hill, slipping in the mud. We bury her in a shallow grave, in this bowl-shaped depression at the edge of the woods, under the oak and pine, her head toward the east to meet the rising sun. Gently we cover her with topsoil, plant two trees at either end of the grave and cover the surface with mulch.
I use a stone I unearthed to mark the spot. The rock is about a foot-and-a-half long. It points skyward like a crooked finger. She went this way, it says.
Tags: burial, dog, peace, pet, woods
Posted in Culture, Nature, Writers | No Comments »
Wednesday, September 7th, 2011
Laura Larsell has posted a thoughtful article on Mashable called “Why Browsing Is So Important to Content Discovery.” In it the librarian and information organizer at Trapit argues that the practice is a crucial component of information discovery.
Today we find information directly through search engines or indirectly through social media contacts, but those processes narrow the chute from the beginning. Larsell says browsing offers value in that it opens us to chance and opportunity before we dig too deeply. “It allows an information seeker to expand organically upon an initial vague, often unarticulated need.”
In a phrase, browsing gives readers the big picture, not just the details, a critical advantage when starting a project. “Browsing gives information seekers a high-level sense of what exists within a collection, while presenting easy entry points to explore the unknown. It also allows for lesser-known works to stand alongside — and compete with — the more canonical ones they resemble.”
Tags: books, browsing, Google, internet, library, publications, research, search engine, Social media
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Internet, Nonfiction, Novel, Social media, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Thursday, August 11th, 2011
We try to ignore spam, the unsolicited email and comments on our blogs designed to sell everything from male enhancement to website development. Judging from the text, much of it comes from people who grapple with English as well as ethics. Their pitches would be funny if we didn’t have to waste so much time weeding the mailbox or disinfecting our blogs. But like physical graffiti, some of the defacement is fascinating. Like admiring a tattoo without committing to one.
Take the reaction from a post I did on The Builder Buzz, a new feed about innovation in the building trades. The post is called “ABC Green Home debuts at Pacific builders’ show.” The comment goes like this (as Dave Barry says, I am not making this up):
“Thank you for picking the correct go over this excellent, I am fervently about that not to mention real love reading through a little more about this kind of article. As long as promising, as you may generate specialist knowledge, wouldn’t you reactions posting an individual’s web page with a lot more particulars? This is very useful for i am”
WordPress flagged the author as “autoblogging” at zoomshare.com, a website hosting and traffic optimization service, so we can assume this is a bot. The host is listed as Los Angeles-based Ubiquity Server Solutions, which apparently facilitates bulk email blasts.
Makes you long for the good old days of Nigerian bank scams. At least those messages have a plot.
My personal blog seems to attract the greatest amount of spam. Most of it is promotional and contains links to websites that offers products or services (and I’m being kind here). You can tell from the URL but you can’t always suss that out from the comment itself. Case in point: this pitch for a free iPad and iPhone:
“Hello! I realize this is kind of off-topic however I needed to ask. Does building a well-established blog like yours take a massive amount work? I’m completely new to operating a blog but I do write in my journal daily. I’d like to start a blog so I can share my experience and feelings online. Please let me know if you have any recommendations or tips for brand new aspiring bloggers. App”reciate it!”
The text sounds legitimate until you look at the clues: a suspect URL or email address, poor grammar and punctuation and the favorite phrase of the digital parasite, “This is kind of off topic.”
More like questionable ethics on the part of the business that hired this person.
That random comment follows an earlier blast from a spammer linking to the same URL but using a different email address at Yahoo! That one starts “My spouse and I absolutely love your blog and find almost all of your post’s to be just what I’m looking for.”
Almost? If you’re going to flatter, you might as well go all the way.
Then there’s the other black hole of time and money, the email inbox. Back when I was using a permission-based mail system it calculated that over five years 98% of all messages received were spam. The server software where I work must use a smarter algorithm because we get very little spam but the personal mailboxes reek of the stuff. Just today I received notice about horoscopes (“Click here now for Your Free Prediction, Free Tarot Reading, and Free Biorhythm”), diets (“Safely lose 20-30 pounds in 30 days!”) and dating (“Love is there. We can help you find it.”)
I predict the only thing we want to find is the off button.
Back to blogs. Here’s one more example of digital pollution to close the show, from an erstwhile marketer trying to sell laptop cases:
“Throughout the great scheme of things you actually secure a B+ with regard to effort. Where you actually confused us ended up being in your particulars. You know, people say, the devil is in the details.”
No, the devil is on the Internet.
Tags: blog, comments, defacement, digital, email, graffiti, inbox, internet, pollution, spam, time, Web
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Thursday, August 4th, 2011
“I could be wrong now . . . but I don’t think so.”
– Randy Newman, singing the theme song from the TV show “Monk”
Writing in the August 2011 issue of The Retail Observer, Moe Lastfogel says that too many people in business fear being wrong. They confuse making mistakes with defects of character. Because of the perception of errors as a sign of weakness, they choke off a source of ideas that can differentiate their company from the competition.
He quotes Kathryn Shulz, author of Being Wrong, as saying that while making mistakes is part of the human condition, it’s viewed as shameful and degenerate in business. “In this rather despairing view our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual and moral failings. Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list.”
The irony is that mistakes can lead to discovery, she says. “Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.” Think of the experiments that led to penicillin and the light bulb.
Lastfogel reinforces that view with a few ideas of his own. “At what stage in our life did we start believing that we need to be perfect at everything we do? In the real world, we need to be wrong, not deterred, just wrong sometimes. We need to push our comfort zones to get ahead.”
That’s especially true for creatives, who need that process of trial and success, of finding what works by working through what doesn’t. As a process it’s humble and inefficient but it can create breakout solutions. And as the twin forces of recession and contention continue to infect our spirit, all of us could use an infusion of unconventional thinking.
I could be wrong now, but I don’t think so.
Tags: breakout, creatives, creativity, mistakes, Monk, Randy Newman, Retail Observer, thinking, wrong
Posted in Business, Commerce, Culture, Writers, Writing | No Comments »
Digital graffiti
Thursday, August 11th, 2011We try to ignore spam, the unsolicited email and comments on our blogs designed to sell everything from male enhancement to website development. Judging from the text, much of it comes from people who grapple with English as well as ethics. Their pitches would be funny if we didn’t have to waste so much time weeding the mailbox or disinfecting our blogs. But like physical graffiti, some of the defacement is fascinating. Like admiring a tattoo without committing to one.
Take the reaction from a post I did on The Builder Buzz, a new feed about innovation in the building trades. The post is called “ABC Green Home debuts at Pacific builders’ show.” The comment goes like this (as Dave Barry says, I am not making this up):
“Thank you for picking the correct go over this excellent, I am fervently about that not to mention real love reading through a little more about this kind of article. As long as promising, as you may generate specialist knowledge, wouldn’t you reactions posting an individual’s web page with a lot more particulars? This is very useful for i am”
WordPress flagged the author as “autoblogging” at zoomshare.com, a website hosting and traffic optimization service, so we can assume this is a bot. The host is listed as Los Angeles-based Ubiquity Server Solutions, which apparently facilitates bulk email blasts.
Makes you long for the good old days of Nigerian bank scams. At least those messages have a plot.
My personal blog seems to attract the greatest amount of spam. Most of it is promotional and contains links to websites that offers products or services (and I’m being kind here). You can tell from the URL but you can’t always suss that out from the comment itself. Case in point: this pitch for a free iPad and iPhone:
“Hello! I realize this is kind of off-topic however I needed to ask. Does building a well-established blog like yours take a massive amount work? I’m completely new to operating a blog but I do write in my journal daily. I’d like to start a blog so I can share my experience and feelings online. Please let me know if you have any recommendations or tips for brand new aspiring bloggers. App”reciate it!”
More like questionable ethics on the part of the business that hired this person.
That random comment follows an earlier blast from a spammer linking to the same URL but using a different email address at Yahoo! That one starts “My spouse and I absolutely love your blog and find almost all of your post’s to be just what I’m looking for.”
Almost? If you’re going to flatter, you might as well go all the way.
Then there’s the other black hole of time and money, the email inbox. Back when I was using a permission-based mail system it calculated that over five years 98% of all messages received were spam. The server software where I work must use a smarter algorithm because we get very little spam but the personal mailboxes reek of the stuff. Just today I received notice about horoscopes (“Click here now for Your Free Prediction, Free Tarot Reading, and Free Biorhythm”), diets (“Safely lose 20-30 pounds in 30 days!”) and dating (“Love is there. We can help you find it.”)
I predict the only thing we want to find is the off button.
Back to blogs. Here’s one more example of digital pollution to close the show, from an erstwhile marketer trying to sell laptop cases:
“Throughout the great scheme of things you actually secure a B+ with regard to effort. Where you actually confused us ended up being in your particulars. You know, people say, the devil is in the details.”
No, the devil is on the Internet.
Tags: blog, comments, defacement, digital, email, graffiti, inbox, internet, pollution, spam, time, Web
Posted in Commerce, Culture, Writers, Writing | No Comments »