Perceptive campaign plays with paradox
When Perceptive Software needed to fill 130 positions — more than one-third of its existing workforce — in just three months, a contradiction in terms was just what the company needed.… Read the full article
Wordplay
How do you coin a word?
Change a letter, change a word
HITS HAPPEN, blares a car insurance company promoting its “accident forgiveness insurance.”
Change a letter, change a word.
How can you add, subtract, move or change letters or syllables to make your copy more creative via wordplay?… Read the full article
How to write a haiku
Get the word out in 17 syllables
Call it Curbside Haiku.
When the New York City Department of Transportation needed new street safety signs, the DOT posted 144 signs with Japanese haiku, the three-line poem with a syllable count of 17.… Read the full article
How to find the etymology of a word
Express the spirit of your words by exploring their origins
One of the most creative examples of wordplay I’ve ever seen came straight from some good dictionary research.… Read the full article
Help people remember with acronyms
Create a mnemonic
First there was FUBAR: F***ed Up Beyond All Recognition. Now, thanks to the Urban Dictionary, we also have PHOBAR: PHOtoshopped Beyond All Recognition.… Read the full article
How to coin a new word
Create new terms by merging old ones
Tracy Ousdahl and Paul Pinney have traveled the globe. But sometimes, instead of venturing out to a cool destination, they use their time off to visit their families.… Read the full article
3 ways to find balance, or parallelism
Take a tip from Charles Dickens
Charles Dickens famously used balance to introduce A Tale of Two Cities:
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …
To create balance, you might steal a tip from Dickens and:
1.
… Read the full articleWhat is alliteration used for
Try this literary device in headlines, leads & quotes
Remember Barack Obama’s speeches? Those lyrical lines like:
“Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”
… Read the full articleWhy wordplay works in communications
We pay attention to and remember puns, alliteration
A hand shoots up in my Make Your Copy More Creative workshop.
“But,” the communicator says, “don’t you risk confusing people with wordplay?”… Read the full article
Play twister
Four steps to twist of phrase
“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
— Jack London, American author and adventurer
Some people are natural-born phrase twisters.… Read the full article