The thesaurus gets a bad rap. School teachers forbid it and Stephen King is a famous opponent. In his first novel Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer wrote the bad English of Ukrainian character Alex by using a thesaurus to change small, ordinary words into big, ill-fitting ones. The compounded effect is horrifying and hilarious.... Read more
A journalist’s inbox is flooded with press releases every day, and the vast majority of those end up deleted or forgotten. Here are five of the top reasons yours might be one of them (and how you can help it avoid that fate in future). Read more
Tone of voice. Verbal identity. Brand language. Whatever you call it, each has the same aim: to bring character, coherence and consistency to the way an organisation expresses itself in words. Why? Because adding character helps distinguish you from everyone else. Being coherent provides a richer, more meaningful experience. And being consistent helps build trust... Read more
There are over seven billion people on the planet, and over three billion of them use the internet. But with a saturated market of almost one billion websites – how are you going to stand out? Read more
I’ll let you in on a secret… even though I write all day every day, there are times when I sit down to write, hands over the keyboard, clean blank page in front of me – and nothing comes. Read more
From 21 April, Google’s ‘guidelines’ favour websites that work well across desktop, tablet and mobile. And lots of people have already been caught out by these new ‘mobile-friendliness’ rules (us included). Web designers and developers will be busy for a while, then. But what about your content… the words that really get your messages across? Read more
From push to pull So content marketing is essentially the social side of marketing. It’s the next big shift away from the hard sell, towards attracting customers with stories about them and the myriad problems they want to solve. Read more
Storytelling People like stories, not sales pitches. Not just the facts. In an information overload world, we’re all looking for the part that means something to us, and will benefit us personally in some way. We’re continuously asking ‘so what?’ Read more
