I’ve conducted countless interviews in my career, and every time, I learn something new, not only about the topic at hand but also about the actual process of interviewing. That’s because interviewing is a learned skill, and I’m constantly looking to improve. Why do interviewing skills matter? A quality interview gets better quotes. It helps [...]
As a creative, you love your work and care about every word, every image, every design, every note. But in agency or corporate work, there are a lot of competing priorities — executives, other teams, even other content creators who don’t seem to understand what you do. So, we want to remind you that YOU [...]
Be proactive, be proactive, be proactive. Communications experts love to tout the benefits of being proactive. But what if the constant requests for flyers, PowerPoints and webpages have your team saddled with such a backlog that it’s all you can do to get even one of your own social posts up each day? How are [...]
Living a healthy lifestyle by eating right and exercising is the key to lowering your cancer risk, preventing heart disease, reducing your chances of developing diabetes, etc., etc., etc. Every time I write an article about a health condition, the experts tell me the answer to lowering my risk lies in lifestyle changes. But I’ll [...]
I love food — especially delicious, healthy food — so you can imagine my delight when I learned healthy eating can boost creativity. I also love trying new dishes and developing my own recipes to accommodate my son’s food allergies. (You can read about that journey on my personal blog, Kiddos Cook.) So I’ve rounded [...]
If you think Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, you’ve never been on Twitter the day the Associated Press (AP) releases its annual style updates. Each year, the news co-op adds entries for new or newly popular terms, adds context to existing entries and sometimes, to the chagrin of many copy editors the [...]
So, you have a style guide. (If not, start with our advice on how to create a style guide.) But what about a process for updating it? If you’re open to taking suggestions from others in your organization when it comes to making changes to it, consider creating a request form that lives on your [...]
It was junior high when I started checking the Flesch-Kincaid reading grade level on my term papers and essays. I would get so excited when it came back at 11, 12 or higher. I was writing at a college level! How advanced was I?!?! Looking back, that was kind of silly. Sure, I impressed some [...]
How do you know if you’ve succeeded with getting your copy to the right grade level? Two easy-to-use tools: Word. The ubiquitous word processing program makes doing a readability check simple. Run spell check, but don’t be so quick to close the dialogue box that appears after it’s done. You’ll see a readability report, which [...]
Writer’s block looks different in everyone. Movies like to show writers tossing endless balls of crumpled up paper at an overflowing trash can when they can’t find the right words. Some people stare blankly at their computer screen. Personally, I clean and organize. Or I bake. Bad writer’s block = lots of cake. We [...]
