Oliver Sacks died yesterday. He was a neurologist who wrote about his cases. I loved his prose. You could learn a lot from his unornamented style and intriguing titles. When you start reading something he has written, you immediately relax, knowing you are in the hands of a master storyteller. His narrative sweeps you away into…
Robots and other forms of automation are going to transform the job market, but how much? There are four points of view. And that’s a good way to understand what it means to be an analyst. The pessimist looks at the decline of jobs like secretary or factory worker and sees the same pattern in automation…
I just finished Steven Pinker’s book on writing style. I like Pinker’s take on writing; I learned a lot from it. It’s a great guide and you should read it, but be aware that business writers need to bring a different and more practical perspective to the advice in this book. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker is…
No topic has more bullshit than people writing about diets and nutrition. I learned that from my favorite food expert, Kerri Hawkins. Today, I interview her about the way diet companies, food companies, restaurants, and media bullshit us about food. Kerri is the the past president of the Massachusetts Dietetic Association and has helped people to lose…
Jon Stewart inspires me. In my moments of absolute fantasy I imagine I am in some small way contributing to the work he began. So it gives me great pleasure that he devoted the final moments of his final show to the theme “Bullshit is everywhere.” He cites, for example: The bullshit of infinite possibility:…
Teachers should reward brevity, not bullshit. (This is a follow-on to yesterday’s post about teaching writing.) Writing assignments today look like this: Turn in 4- to 6-page paper on themes and symbolism is Raisin in the Sun by Monday morning. Everything is wrong with this. The page length trains students to focus on print rather than online, which…
Here’s a radical idea. Let’s teach high school and college students to write stuff that they’ll actually need to write in life or in an office: emails, blog posts, social media posts, marketing copy, research reports, and presentations. Take time from analyzing Plato, Great Expectations and Catcher in the Rye and spend it instead analyzing great non-fiction writers like Mary Roach, Malcolm Gladwell, Michael…
Crappy writing springs from crappy planning. Like an architect, plan before you build. On a project that takes weeks or months to write, spend at least one day on planning. Follow these planning tips to maximize your chance to create something great. In this post, I show you how to lay the groundwork for a writing project like…
I recently did a Skype interview with Paul Gillin and Eric Schwartzman, the coauthors of Social Marketing to the Business Customer and proprietors of the B2B branch of the outstanding podcast For Immediate Release. Paul and Eric gave me a chance to talk about what I’m passionate about: the lack of candor in most business communication, how…