Content Development: Easy Transitions
How do you keep all those paragraphs smooth while changing subjects from sentence to sentence and paragraph to paragraph in an article? The answer is transitions.
writing
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Creating Error-Free Copy
The human eye may not be able to catch every error, but striving for the perfect piece of copy starts with a few simple proofing measures.
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Content That Works
Too often newsletter articles come across as lectures from above. To keep your audience reading so that they actually absorb the information you are offering, you need to follow a few key steps.
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Simple Writing is Smart
Writers often choose big words — utilize rather than use, or regarding instead of about — in an attempt to sound more important, more intelligent. You’re smarter than that, right?
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Top Ten Words
Merriam-Webster’s Top Ten Words lists cover a slew of fun subjects.
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Punctuation!!!!! – Watch Out For Exclamation Points
At the risk of sounding totally geeked-out, I hate exclamation points. When I see unnecessary or excessive exclamation points, it’s my equivalent of nails on a chalkboard. Most of the custom content I write or edit at Parthenon is straight-forward, so exclamation points rarely crop up. They’re pretty rare in newspaper and magazine writing as well. But e-mails — professional and personal — now that’s a different story.
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Jargon be Gone!
As soon as employees read the words, “synergistic opportunities” their eyes glaze over. Similarly, when customers read self-congratulatory prose about process management improvements, you’ve lost them. While the news being shared may be relevant or even critical to the intended audience, if it is masked in corporate jargon, it will never be heard. One of the most important things a CEO can do to improve his or her communication skills is to stop thinking about the audience and instead focus on the people in it.
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Proofing Counts
Ever picked up a magazine or scanned a website and noticed a misspelled word or grammar mistake? Errors on the printed page or the digital screen can impact a reader’s impression of a publication, brand or writer. So, how do you ensure your company’s proofing process is comprehensive enough to maintain your stellar corporate image? Parthenon editors Nancy Henderson and Katie Neal offer the following advice…
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All Is Not Fair
Brush up on copyright law to avoid conflict
In June, a little-known blog got an unsettling letter from the Associated Press, the country's foremost news wire service. The AP, whose stories are printed in newspapers nationwide, ordered the blog to remove all posts that quoted its stories — and indicated that more sites might receive such notices. The story set the blogosphere buzzing, and within hours, the AP had softened its attack, but the surrounding issues linger. As a recent article in Business Week notes, media organizations are increasingly employing content recognition software to crawl the Web round-the-clock looking for improper use of their copyrighted content. And as the AP incident illustrates, these days you don't have to be one of the most heavily trafficked sites to get caught using something without permission.