- An online service that calculates the readability of your text
Remember to always write for your audience. - A.P. Style Book’s Ask the Editor
- Write or Die
- Fake AP Style Book’s Twitter account
- Grammar Docs: based in Ariz.; produces a steady stream of useful writing advice.
Fave Five for Friday: Gooder Grammar Edition
03
Feb
2012
2012
Steak and Sizzle: Writing and Web Content
29
Jan
2012
2012
Bring steak and sizzle to your writing. Image from sxc.hu.
A colleague recently made an offhand comment to me about how good writing has “steak and sizzle.” I couldn’t agree more.
In the context of content creation, steak represents the heart of a piece of writing, which makes sizzle the metaphoric soul. The steak acts upon the writing, inculcating human senses within the words and bringing realism with each sentence. The sizzle acts upon the reader, propelling the focus beyond the letters on the page and building in visceral emotion.
Without enough of the steak, a reader is left hungry and looking for more. With a proper dose of sizzle, the text falls flat and fails to stay within the reader’s memory.
Too often, writers focus on steak at the expense of the sizzle, or vice versa. It’s a challenge to balance both, but even the most ordinary of writers can produce solid pieces by making a concerted effort to incorporate each. Don’t leave a bad taste within the minds of your readers.
Recipe for Writing with “Steak”
- Cover all the bases by setting up all the journalistic questions – who, what, where, when – and answering them all completely.
- Respond to what you can sense, see, hear, smell and touch.
- Write deductively, using generalizations to build to a specific conclusion.
- Structure the writing around logic, reason and order.
Bringing the Sizzle
- Go beyond what an observer would experience and bring in feelings and intuition.
- Introduce unexpected elements: a colorful metaphor, inspired poetry or flowery language expands the reader’s imagination.
- Explore the topic inductively, building to universal principles from specific examples.
- Build in the fanciful, the fantastic and the flashy.
32 ways to tweak your blog in an afternoon via MarianLibrarian. I love this list because it is so basic, requiring rudimentary skills to implement.
Why choose Oberlin College? Because of their over-the-top unofficial web site. The boldest marketing efforts are generally the most memorable.
A new way of looking at higher education fund raising. Think of alumni as champions, friends or acquaintances. The next logical thought from that set of audiences: tailor messages, frequency and intensity to each audience based on affinity to the college.
Proverbs, axioms and idioms via PR Daily. Not to be confused with metaphors, similes and onomatopoeia.
Admissions is not sales, a response to Admissions…should think like a sales team. I have to come down on the side of “not sales.” I think recruitment is more like a courtship – dating, if you will. Sales is transactional, but admissions is about a relationship, interpersonally between a recruiter and a prospect, then growing to encompass the faculty-student dynamic, and ultimately the brand-student/alum relationship.
I contributed another article to The Agency Post, “Many Stories, Many Audiences,” which was published today.
Creating compelling content for an organization presents a challenge for even the most seasoned writers. Working in higher education, I’m lucky to have several audiences to supply stories. Student achievements, faculty accomplishments and notable alumni all go into the metaphoric hopper to be spit out as stories, web content, testimonials and pitches.
Read the whole story at The Agency Post, and follow them @AgencyPost.
(And as a side note, I need to start doing a better job of practicing what I preach…)
Read My Master’s Thesis, If You Dare
09
Jan
2012
2012
I dug this out of the cold storage/old CD on which it was stored: my master’s thesis, all 67 pages of it. I wrote it so long ago (2003-5), I used (gasp!) non-electronic sources in researching it. The phrase “social media” does not appear in the entire work, but that’s not surprising. That term didn’t even get its own Wikipedia page until 2006.
Looking back at the seven years that have passed since I finished it, some sections are cringeworthy. I warned you.
Introduction
Internet research exists on a spectrum from content-oriented areas of hypertext
theory, rhetoric, and hyperlink network analysis, to human-oriented fields like computermediated communication and human-computer interaction, and on to technology-oriented topics of online presence, information transmission, and innovations. Weblogs manifest elements of each of these areas, as they represent a way to publish content, a channel for communicating with individuals and groups, and an information distribution mechanism. The question, how do bloggers use hyperlinks?, will be answered by drawing upon citation analysis and Internet research on hyperlinks and web sites. This research will involve a series of focus groups that will ascertain the behaviors and motivations of bloggers in practice.
The advent of blogging as a media technology and a communication method
offers an alternative to broadcast media models and an opportunity to extend traditional theories of mass communication. Weblogs represent a convergence of mass, interpersonal, and mediated communication. The presence of weblogs on the Internet provides their authors with a limitless, easily accessible audience. Weblogs feature for interpersonal communication tools that facilitate social interaction. The intrapersonal aspect allows individuals to express inner thoughts through text, images, sounds, and hyperlinks, and to engage in self-exploration.
Fave Five For Friday
23
Dec
2011
2011
- Via @MarkRaganCEO: Five most useful social media tools for PR and marketing
BufferApp, AppMakr, Youtube.com/create, Wanderfly.com, Mynewsdesk.com. - Another from @MarkRaganCEO: How Coca-Cola cultivated the biggest Facebook brand page
- Via @mashable: automatically edit your writing with the AP Stylebook.
- Idea from @mallorywood: “have the admissions office post just one of the questions they got from a phone call on Facebook.” #higheredlive.
- Via Bill Stoller/@publicityguru from Forbes: should you post press releases in social media?
Naughty Words
22
Dec
2011
2011
Bulldog Reporter shared a list of words to eliminate from one’s writing, specifically for public relations. To this list, I add my own.
State of being verbs: is, are, has been – the entire conjugated set of verbs from “to be.” The utility of using these words does not make up for their utter lack of imagination. Taken as a whole, they cause most weak writing examples that I see. Try and write without using them, or use them sparingly, and your writing will improve immediately.
It pains me to type these words. Anyone who has visited my office may have noticed this sign on my wall. I implore you: make your own and tape it near your keyboard. You’ll become a better writer.
state of being words
somewhat
literally
actually
basically
indeed
although
seems
key
holistic
bandwidth
ideate
utilize
whatsoever
leverage
marry
optimize
myriad
plethora
-centric
tipping point
perfect storm
solution
Agency Post – Article Accepted
08
Dec
2011
2011
A piece I wrote for the latest, greatest online publication for public relations and communication professionals has been accepted and is scheduled to appear later in December on The Agency Post. I’ll be in great company, with some well-known contributors, including one from down the road in Rochester (Mike McDougall of McDougall Travers Collins).
I won’t give the content away before it’s published there, but I will divulge that no chickens were harmed in the writing of the article.
Writing for Electronic Media: Course Outline
04
Sep
2008
2008
I had the idea to create a course that would reflect on some of the very pressing needs in the communication industry for clear and creative writing skills. Here is an outline for a little course I like to call Writing for Electronic Media. It’s not the first time this has been taught, nor is it the most polished outline I’ve ever seen, but it gets the job done. I also had a fun time writing it. We’ll see what happens with it.
Writer, communicator, planner, list-maker, parent, volunteer; chef, concierge and COO of the Family Kane.
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