Have you ever been reading something and reached the end of a sentence, then had to start reading the sentence again because you forgot what it was about? Do you think it was simply because it was a long sentence? Or were there other reasons?
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Ah, the joys of youth – growing pains – remember swooning over your first crush from a folding desk? Sorting through your college picks with staggering anxiety, breaking curfew to spend time with your friends, and taking powerful life lessons from Lysol’s most recent ad campaign? Wait, was that just me?
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Q: What would you say are the most overused words from the past year? I nominate “pivot.”
Yes, the word “pivot” – a word that was previously only used in osteopathic and Jazz dance applications – has been tossed around quite brutally, particularly on cable news channels. The Ninja agrees that as an indication of a swift, smooth, and (ideally) imperceptible change in narrative, it is woefully inadequate.
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We’ve all had those insightful moments where a brilliant thought or idea rushes through our mind. It’s this time that we run to grab our pencil and paper and quickly jot down our fleeting thought. Did you ever feel like your brilliant idea became a complete flop once you put it into words? Sometimes it’s not our actual ideas that need tweaking, but rather the language we use to describe them.
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05 07 2016
Copywriting Lessons from Trader Joe’s
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Trader Joe’s is doing some guerrilla marketing, isn’t it?
Don’t worry—the advertisers haven’t bought me yet. This has nothing to do with advertising and everything to do with me stumbling across some marketing materials that have plenty of copywriting lessons to share.
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Copywriting is a peculiar thing.
Online copy and business-directed content don’t follow the same rules as other literary and journalistic works. Copywriting is looser in many ways, and it offers more flexibility in tone and style.
However, this doesn’t mean that you can cram your writing with whatever you want and expect it to work for your clients. The goal of most online copy is to educate and engage a readership about a topic, and just slapping words on a screen won’t do the trick.
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It’s fairly safe to say that no one knows how to write humor. The great modern humor essayists – Dave Barry, P. J. O’Rourke, and the late Lewis Grizzard and Erma Bombeck, among many others –do it naturally, instinctively knowing just what turn of phrase and clever irony readers will find funny, but they probably couldn’t even begin to explain how they do it. People who are not great humor writers, obviously, don’t know either.
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In an increasingly digital business landscape, failing to have an online presence can make or break a company’s monetary momentum.
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22 12 2015
Explaining New Media to My Dad
More than a few times over the past year, in the midst of going down an Internet rabbit hole, I’ve wondered what my dad would make of all this. A world of information at my fingertips; searches that beget endless questions. He still had dial-up when he died. The pixelated outer space sound would ping through his small condo while he would wait to check the messages in his AOL account.
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Exposure, attention and the inevitable backlash associated with social media in a digital age is now a never-ending public obsession.
