My mother died earlier this week. She was quite a character and did all sorts of fascinating things over her 87 years. One thing she was very enthusiastic about was genealogy; when she’d finished following her and my father’s families back to Noah (you think I’m joking!) she moved on to do them for other people. [...]
I’m a member of BNI (Business Network International), a business referral group. For our meeting next Friday we’ve been asked to take props relevant to our business and I’ve been wondering what I should take. The most obvious thing would be my laptop, as that’s what I use for all my writing. I write quite [...]
I’m reading an enchanting book at the moment called “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” (henceforward called “TGLPPPS”). I picked it up in a second-hand bookshop because of the title, as you do. The novel is set in 1946, shortly after the Germans had left the Channel Islands, and in the first half [...]
Today we have a guest blog from novelist Sarah Fredricks, who writes of her experience of self-publishing on Amazon’s Kindle. How can you earn money when it’s free? Bizarre, but that can be the reality of an Amazon promotion. Let me backtrack. I’m a newly self-published author (in fact I’m just approaching my first [...]
I was riffling through a dictionary the other day, the way you do, and stumbled upon the word “Mundungus”. I’d read it before, lots of times, in the Harry Potter books, without realising it was a proper word. Apparently it is a “Noun, from the Spanish meaning ‘entrails’; in English, the stench of tobacco”. Another [...]
I’ve finally achieved one ambition: to have a piece published in a magazine devoted to scuba diving (Scuba, the British Sub-Aqua Club’s member magazine). I had hoped that it would be a feature full of words of wisdom, experience, charm perhaps. But no – it was all about how I came up feet first on [...]
Last week saw the 60th anniversary of the accession of Queen Elizabeth II and the 425th anniversary of the beheading of Mary Queen of Scots. The juxtaposition gives a whole new meaning to that customer service staple, “We treat you like Royalty”, and made me think about other ads, headlines and slogans that don’t quite [...]
I got involved in a discussion in a copywriters’ group on LinkedIn the other day. The original question was whether jargon was ever OK in business publications. I replied that technical jargon is fine if you’re writing for a technical audience, but it turned out that wasn’t what he meant at all. He meant that meaningless business [...]
With Valentine’s Day coming up I thought it was a good time to talk about when “we” is not the best word to use. If you’re visiting a website is it a) to read the history of the company, who designed its premises, and the number of widgets it can churn out on any given day? or [...]
I spent yesterday morning at a workshop on Social Media: how it works and how to use it to promote your business. It was very interesting and potentially useful. The Scarlet Bakery’s giant cupcake One of the speakers was the co-owner of The Scarlet Bakery, who uses Facebook for all their marketing. They have no [...]
Another guest article, this time by Pete Savage. Find more details about Pete at the end of this post. Sometimes when you learn of the work habits and rituals of successful people in your field, a funny thing can happen. Perhaps it has happened to you before, whether you were reading a self-development book, [...]
I’ve just renewed my membership of Growing Ambitions, a UK-wide careers information service that puts real people like me, doing real jobs, in front of school students to talk to them about life in the real world of work (to precis the website). I’ve been a member for a year. So far no-one’s asked me [...]
It’s Tuesday lunchtime and I’m waiting for a client to send me the information I need to write an 8-10 page A4 brochure and an A5 flyer for them by the end of the week. Not too bad, on the face of it: that leaves me three and a half days to write them, doesn’t it? Well, no [...]
If you are having a new website created, or editing an old one, it may not occur to you to hire a professional copywriter to create the content for you, but it makes sense for several reasons: First and most important: it means you don’t have to do it. You have plenty of other claims [...]
The other day I attended a seminar where the head honchos of education for Dundee laid out what the Curriculum for Excellence would mean to education in the city over the next couple of decades and how that would affect us, the audience, as employers. The room was filled with members of the Chamber of Commerce, Federation [...]
I’m always being taken to task about the length of my sentences. People can’t cope with sentences more than 10 words long. Or with more than one idea in them. Or with too many long words. Or so I’m told. Rubbish! I don’t believe people’s attention-spans really are shorter now than they were 50 years [...]
Another pair for the Weirds: caliginous means “misty, dim, murky, obscure, dark,” according to the Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Words. It goes on to say “Compare Tenebrous, Thestral” which caught my eye (“Thestral: adj. dark and dim”). As a Harry Potter fan, I thought Thestrals were an invention of J.K. Rowling’s. As beasts they [...]
Today we have another guest posting, from Jay Neaves BA Hons, Media & Communication Studies Author, writer and founder of The Professional Writing Service. I couldn’t agree more with what he says: Creating a website for your business is a big step and ensuring you get your website copywriting right is of paramount importance for [...]
Today we have a guest posting from Dr. Joanna Martin, whose Presentation Profits Secrets seminar I attended last year. Well worth the trip to London! Public speaking is full of people making basic mistakes. Luckily, you don’t have to be one of them! Now you’ve successfully ‘opened’ your presentation, here’s how to avoid the 3 [...]
I’ve just finished another book (some of you may wonder how I get time to work!), this one a personal memoir of Winston Churchill*, and it contained a very interesting quote from the great man: “… to think imperially, which means always to think of something higher and more vast that one’s own national interests.” [...]