Sometimes in business email, Tony Rossiter advises in “Effective Business Writing”, a degree of informality and humor may be appropriate, but this should not be overdone. If you are too formal, the author observes, most people won’t mind. If you are too informal, on the other hand, some people may, in fact, mind. What about […]
“However good a sentence is, you can often find a word or two, or a phrase, that can be deleted without any loss of meaning,” Tony Rossiter advises in “Effective Business Writing”. There are two specific ways to avoid this sort of duplication, he adds: Dump qualifiers. Qualifying adjectives and adverbs (like the first in […]
The Stoics realized that there are things we control, and things we don’t. To get to the good life, we should focus on things we control, accepting the rest as it happens. When it comes to the things we can control, Stoics believe it’s not an external situation that makes us happy or miserable, but […]
The most important job skill of the twenty-first century, Mark Sanborn posits in The Fred Factor, is the ability to create value for customers without spending more money to do it. “Freds” are people who either create new value or add value to the work they already do, the author explains. In creating blog content, needless […]
Earlier this week, my Say It For You blog focused on how-not-to tips when it comes to annoying blog readers. While as Joe Palca and Flora Lichtman point out in National Geographic, few scientists have explained the mild anger we call annoyance, we content writers know annoyance is not the reaction we’re seeking from […]
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