Articles about writing, editing and improving content

“That’s not writing, that’s typing.”

Truman Capote famously dismissed Jack Kerouac’s writing by saying this, and I’m inclined to agree. As much as I love the wide-eyed wonder and glimpses of poetry that run through Kerouac’s work, large tracts of it are barely readable.

The same applies to a lot of what passes as content marketing …

Short sentences are easy to read.

They grab our attention, increase the reading pace, and make it more likely that we’ll move from one sentence to the next.

They’re also easier to understand.

Research by the American Press Institute (API), for example, found that …

If you need to say something in just a few words – which is what happens when you coin a company name, slogan or domain name – it’s a mistake to try and cram as much literal meaning as possible into the message.

According to Microstyle: The Art of Writing Little by Christopher Johnson, “a message isn’t a treasure chest full of meaning. It’s more like a key that opens doors.” …

You’ll never read poetry, watch Shakespeare or listen to a Katy Perry song in quite the same way again after reading Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence.

This irreverent and engaging book explains the ancient figures of rhetoric, ranging from the better known ones such as alliteration right through to obscure sounding techniques such as anadiplosis and hendiadys …

There are so many wondrous words in the English language. Words that fill your mouth and exercise your tongue, such as:

– marmoreal (an adjective meaning like marble, cold, white, smooth)
– verklempt (Yiddish for overcome with emotion)
– cacography (bad spelling or handwriting).

So how do you find the right one? …