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 on [...]
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 ago, or [...]
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 your [...]
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 biggest [...]
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.”
I [...]
Many of you will have seen that the publishers Penguin had a small problem with a cook-book misprint this week (for full details see http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/hot-water-over-spelt-check-20100416-skrh.html) which led to the recall of the book at a cost of $20,000. For ONE WORD!! Admittedly one that could get some people very hot under the collar: the recipe [...]
I’ve recently finished reading the edited Letters of the Mitford sisters. I’ve always been a bit fascinated by them, expecially Nancy; not only did she write excellent books, she also married my Great Uncle Peter (Peter Rodd, or Prod). The letters go from well before the War to the death of Diana in 2002 or [...]
1.) Writing for themselves, not the reader – “we”-ing on the copy
Write about the customer’s need/desire and how you can solve it, not about how “we” did this, “we” own that. To be blunt, your reader doesn’t give tuppence about you, she cares about getting her need/desire fulfilled.
2.) Not having a compelling offer:
Don’t [...]