Google announced it would shut down its social network Google+ yesterday after revealing that it had given outside developers access to private data. At least that’s how the media is describing it. Google’s own statement just buries the news amid a whole bunch of other announcements, like a radioactive pellet in a big bag of…
The New York Times published a piece about helicopter parents making obvious and easily detectable edits to college essays. Once you recognize that your job as an editor is to improve writers, not just writing, you won’t do stuff like that. The writer of the Times piece, titled “How I Know You Wrote Your Kid’s College…
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh defended himself in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. He says you can trust him to be impartial. Did he undo the damage he did during his hearing last week? Just a reminder: the purpose of this blog is to reveal what’s really going on with written communications. I’m…
Like several hundred million other Americans, I received a lump of passive voice in the form of a Presidential Alert yesterday. This was a huge time waster. So I fixed it. I was out at a farmers’ market when all of our phones and radios started hooting and whining. People got annoyed and kept shopping….
The objective of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election was never to elect Donald Trump — it was to create chaos. So let’s game it out. You are the head of Russian intelligence. You’re out to build on your success in 2016 and make America as impotent and divided as possible. What would you do?…
Tim Berners-Lee, the man who created the Web, is frustrated with how giants like Facebook and incompatible apps rule our online experience. His solution is Solid, and open-source project that will allow you to control your own data. Solid is a long shot — unless Apple gets behind it. Berners-Lee described his vision in a blog…
I work on a certain kind of business book. It’s about a shift in the world, and the shift in strategy that companies and people need to make in response. There is a best way to write a book like that, and Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin’s Talk Triggers is the best example I’ve seen in…
There’s this book called Talk Triggers by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin. It has alpacas on the cover. And you should buy it, because it’s really useful. If you’re in an agency, or in marketing, you’ve probably heard clients say “We want to create something viral.” It’s practically a meme. And it’s insipid. You cannot…
Regardless of what happens when Christine Blasey Ford testifies in the Senate today about Brett Kavanaugh assaulting her in high school, we now have a written opening statement from her to review. It’s straightforward and detailed. If you have a difficult story to tell, you could learn from this. I’m under no illusions about this…