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…
You’re going to read a lot about this cable merger. Most of it will be bullshit. Here is the truth (based on more than a decade of closely watching the cable and TV industries): These cable operators will tell regulators that the efficiencies in this merger will enable them to improve customer service. But customer service…
Elections and bullshit go together. That’s why I was intrigued to get several suggestions to analyze Philadelphia Magazine’s “No Bullshit Mayoral Election Guide.” Sadly, I think bullshit is an essential element of all election guides, including this one. Patrick Kerkstra, writing in Philadelphia Magazine, describes his guide this way: … [W]e’ve put together this bottom-line assessment of the…
Writing in the New York Times, Farhad Manjoo decries “A Tech Boom Aimed at the Few, Instead of the World.” But he ignores the history of how successful tech adoption inevitably spreads experiences to everyone. According to Manjoo: The tech industry used to think big. . . . These were dreams of vast breadth: The founders of…
Lack of discipline pollutes your writing. Multiply by the whole world of “content creators” and we’re all consuming brown, dirty prose. I’ve spent time in Beijing and São Paulo. While the people were wonderful, the air was awful. A light brown miasma cast a pall on everything, making our eyes itch and making every incredible cityscape appear…
My insurance company Vermont Mutual was kind enough to pay my claim for house damage after this awful winter. But before I repair my house, I’d like remodel their customer communication. Vermont Mutual deserves a lot of credit. They were speedy to send an assessor to check the damage, and paid a fair amount. In…
Blogging is wonderful. People all over the world have shared their perspectives with me. While many of my blog commenters are apparently not native speakers of English, I find their idiom delightful, almost poetic. I had to reject 1,077 comments on this blog. But so you won’t miss out, I present here the most poetic excerpts from…
I became creative in December 1995 at the age of 37. The previous May, Forrester Research had hired me as an analyst to write what were supposed to be groundbreaking research reports. I worked for two very smart people, Mary Modahl and Bill Bluestein. My first report turned out great. I loved the process and the result….
If you’d like to publish (or self-publish) a book, you now have more options than ever. You also have a complex set of choices. I’ll walk you through them and finish with a flow-chart for the various alternatives, including Kickstarter. This post is for potential how-to and business book authors. If you’re writing fiction or history, you’ll have to…