Posted in Books, Communication, Language, Poetry, Reading on December 19th, 2006 No Comments »
Apparently Shakespeare’s use of language is good for your head. It gets it all excited and twitchy as it’s forced to do engage in that unusual process of thinking.
In particular, Shakespeare’s use of a linguistic technique known as a functional shift, where a part of speech is employed in an unusual way — a noun […]
Posted in Communication, Writers, Writing on October 22nd, 2006 No Comments »
One of my favourite words is tenacity. My dictionary defines it this way:
“not readily letting go of, giving up, or separated from an object that one holds, a position, or a principle”
I’m thinking about tenacity now having reread Bree’s post Rules for effective political letter-writing. To her list I would add, “be tenacious.”
Tenacity, in anything, […]
Posted in Blogs, Communication, General, Internet, Web, Work on September 9th, 2006 1 Comment »
I have not posted anything on any of my blogs in the last few days and I’ve been wondering why. The answer kept coming back: I had nothing to post about. I started mulling that over.
First, I wondered why I had nothing to post. The answer was that I actually had much I could have […]
Posted in Communication, Copywriting, Language, Marketing, Writing on March 30th, 2006 No Comments »
I wandered over to Gapingvoid and saw that the word “cool” (as in, “cool prizes“) isn’t the only word that needs to be turfed from the copywriting lexicon. I see we need a new word to replace “luxury.”
Hugh writes, “One of the most unpleasant jobs I ever had was writing a 10,000 word brochure for […]
Posted in Communication, Language, Marketing, Writing on March 24th, 2006 1 Comment »
Could we please pass a law that makes it illegal to use “great†and “cool†as modifiers in marketing copy? Or any copy for that matter!
Why would you say you have a great product? Is there a company on the planet that doesn’t claim to have a great product? What exactly does saying something is […]
Posted in Blogs, Communication, Web Writing, Writing on March 13th, 2006 No Comments »
Articulating a very real problem with blogging as it is today, Seth posts The noisy tragedy of the blog commons, a little something about too much of a good thing.
He is definitely describing me when he talks about the surfeit of RSS feeds. I largely ignore everything now. I rarely open Bloglines anymore, I just […]
Posted in Blogs, Communication, Language, Writing on March 4th, 2006 No Comments »
You’ll see references to the word “lens†all over the Internet. I don’t mean lens as in a camera lens but lens as it is referred to in Web 2.0 terms, marketing and business.
What you won’t find is a definition. So, what do they mean when they refer to a “lens�
I dunno.
This question came up […]
Posted in Communication, Writing on February 25th, 2006 No Comments »
One of my favourite hobbyhorses is acronyms – they drive me crazy. I understand why they are used. I think they can be practical, even functional. But it just makes me nuts the way they are used with the assumption readers are aware of their meaning.
This week I while trawling blogs I saw AI being […]
Posted in Communication, Language on June 25th, 2005 No Comments »
One of the intriguing things about looking at blog statistics is, over time, you see what interests people. And, at least to some small degree, you can see who is interested in what posts.
Of all the posts I’ve written, the one that keeps coming up is Language as a communication barrier, which I posted just […]
Posted in Communication, Web Writing on May 31st, 2005 No Comments »
It seems sometimes all I do is moan and complain about others (and I’m probably as guilty as anyone of these various sins) but I’ve spent a good part of today visiting a number of sites and now feel compelled to say …
The Internet is about the world. That is the audience. That is who […]
