Writing workshops, communication consulting and writing services
Screenwriter Nora Ephron long remembered the first day of her high school journalism class.
Ephron’s teacher announced the first assignment: to write the lead for a story to appear in the student newspaper.… Read the full article
Having trouble finding reader benefits? Maybe you need to ask different questions.
If you were giving away a Hawaiian vacation to people who signed up for your webinar, which would you lead with?… Read the full article
“Clean your face,” demands a hotel soap wrapper. No, YOU clean YOUR face! I want to respond.… Read the full article
You. It’s a power tool of communications.
The second person increases readability, boosts opens and clickthroughs and is the most retweeted word in the English language.… Read the full article
It feels so good to talk about ourselves.
Talking about yourself activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as food, money or sex, according to Harvard neuroscientist Diana Tamir and her colleague Jason Mitchell, whose research on the topic was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.… Read the full article
Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves.… Read the full article
I was coaching a communicator for a California health insurance plan the other day.… Read the full article
If you wanted to keep teens from smoking weed, what message might you communicate?
One health organization, reports Guy Kawasaki in his book Enchantment, used the message that young people who smoked weed were five times more likely to engage in sex.… Read the full article
You know that the topic is never the topic: The reader is the topic.
You’ve acknowledged that readers don’t care about “us and our stuff”; they care about themselves and their needs.… Read the full article
