“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 […]
“Annoyance may well be the most widely experienced and least studied of all known human emotions,” writes Joe Palca in National Geographic. “Traffic. Mosquitoes. People who snap their gum. People who crack their knuckles. There are so many things in the world that are just downright annoying.” True, a vast literature exists on anger, aversion, […]
Follow us online!