Tag: Voice & Style
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How Innocence and Fresh Perspective Can Drive Business Success
A vice president once patted me on the head, literally, physically, on my actual head, and told me I was “charmingly naive” for suggesting we treat our customers like they had functioning brains. This was in a conference room with bad fluorescent lighting and a potted plant that had clearly given up on life. I…
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The Surprising Reason Audiences Reject Unfiltered Authenticity
I had a t-shirt from SXSW Interactive 2000, the kind of faded, threadbare artifact that only looks cool because you actually were there and the shirt earned every frayed edge honestly. I wore it like a badge of honor. Then a friend showed up to dinner in a shirt that looked almost identical. Same vintage…
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The One Trait All Readers Share: Leverage It for Maximum Relevance
It doesn’t matter if you write about minimalism or motorcycles. If you have an audience, it contains three concentric circles: 1. People who read your content. 2. People who read and share your content. 3. People who take action on the advice in your content. These aren’t separate tribes. They overlap. The person who implements…
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Polish Your Drafts: Transforming Mediocre Writing Into Exceptional Prose
The phrase “something more” should be engraved above every writer’s desk. Not as aspiration, as standard. Because here’s what I’ve noticed after years of editing: the difference between content that disappears and content that sticks isn’t the idea. It’s the edit. A mediocre idea, edited with care and stubbornness, will outperform a brilliant idea rushed…
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Letting Your Inner Artist and Tough Critic Collaborate on Your Writing
Type, type, type. Backspace, backspace, backspace. Type a sentence, delete half of it, rewrite the other half, stare at it, decide it’s wrong, and start over. Sound familiar? Of course it does. Every writer knows this rhythm, the maddening two-steps-forward, one-step-back dance of trying to write and edit at the same time. It’s excruciatingly slow.…
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How Regular Writing Practice Creates Rich, Layered Content
We all recognize junk content the way we recognize junk food, instantly, viscerally, with a slight grimace. But “high-quality” content? That’s harder to define. Here’s my best shot: it’s content that helps your audience in ways they can’t find anywhere else. Simple to say. Not so simple to produce. Because the content that actually moves…
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How Refined Authors Adapt Frameworks Without Losing Originality
Templates are like cilantro. People either worship them or regard them with deep suspicion, and both camps are wrong. The lovers treat templates like vending machines, insert formula, extract result. They chase gimmicks and headline plug-and-play frameworks without doing the thinking underneath. The result is content that looks like everyone else’s content, which is another…
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Five Clever Techniques for Weaving Metaphor Into Magnetic Writing
I was halfway through a perfectly fine article when I swapped the headline for a metaphor and watched the click-through rate double overnight. Same article. Same audience. One image changed everything. That’s when I stopped thinking of metaphors as literary garnish and started treating them as load-bearing walls. Here’s the uncomfortable truth: most content is…
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Eleven Frequent Grammar Errors Writers Keep Making
Let’s get something out of the way: I’m not here to be your grammar scold. Writing that’s conversational and engaging will always serve you better than writing that’s technically flawless but stiff enough to crack. Some of the best sentences ever written break rules on purpose. Outside of academic and professional contexts, writing that’s easier…
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Eight Powerful Revisions That Turn Average Writing Into Exceptional Prose
I once spent forty-five minutes editing a single paragraph. Not because it was broken. Because it was almost right, and “almost right” is the most dangerous state a piece of writing can inhabit. It lulls you into complacency. It whispers, “Good enough.” It is not good enough. Here’s the uncomfortable truth most writing advice won’t…
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Eight Methods to Blend Basic Imagery with Your Powerful Writing
It happened around third grade. You were nine. And something shifted. Before that age, you drew without embarrassment. You built towers. You mixed colors with abandon. You tried everything because you hadn’t yet learned the phrase “I’m not good at that.” Then the sorting began. The teachers and the classmates and the standardized tests carved…
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Five Reader Personalities You Should Feel Free to Disregard
I once received two emails within the same hour. One said I was publishing too often. The other said I wasn’t publishing enough. I stared at both, wondering if I’d accidentally built a audience of exact opposites. Here’s the emotional truth most writing advice won’t name: wanting to please everyone isn’t generosity. It’s fear dressed…
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Drop the Fluff and Start Producing Sharper Prose Today
“Composition is a discipline; it forces us to think. If you want to ‘get in touch with your feelings,’ fine, talk to yourself; we all do. But, if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order; give them a purpose; use them to persuade,…
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Do You Have the Guts to Create Bold Content?
In January 2006, I launched a blog with the tagline “How to sell with blogs.” Within weeks, prominent bloggers were calling me pond scum. Publicly. By name. With genuine contempt. And here’s the part most people don’t believe: that was the plan. I knew that tagline would offend the old guard of blogging, the purists…
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Distinguishing Between Metaphor, Simile, and Analogy Once and for All
A friend of mine was presenting to a board of directors when someone interrupted to say, “That’s not a metaphor, that’s a simile.” He froze. He stumbled. He lost the room over a distinction he couldn’t articulate. He never made that mistake again. Neither should you. Here’s the thing: these three tools are cousins, not…
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Crafting Intimate Prose Without Crossing into Narcissism
I almost didn’t write this introduction. Not because I had nothing to say, because I had too much to say about myself, and I could feel the slide beginning. The one where a perfectly useful essay becomes a diary entry with a megaphone. Every writer who dares to be personal knows that slide. It’s the…
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Developing Your Writing Personality Without Going Overboard
I once read a blog post that opened with three exclamation points, deployed the word “amazeballs” without irony, and included so many emoji that my screen looked like a teenager’s phone had exploded across it. The topic? B2B software implementation. The writer was trying to be lively. I respect the impulse. But somewhere between “conversational”…
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Crafting an About Page That Connects with Visitors and Drives Revenue
I have watched people agonize over their About page for weeks, rewriting, reorganizing, second-guessing every word, with an intensity they did not bring to their actual marriage proposals. Something about writing about yourself makes otherwise confident people seize up like an engine with no oil. You become both the subject and the object. The photographer…
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Creating Prose That Connects Deeply with Your Audience
I once spent three hours on a blog post that I was certain was brilliant. Published it. Crickets. A week later I dashed off 400 words about a small frustration I figured nobody else would care about, and it generated more response than anything I’d written in months. The difference wasn’t quality. It was connection.…
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Captivate Your Perfect Audience Through Meaningful Content
In 2014, Jerry Seinfeld sat down with Alec Baldwin for a podcast interview and said something that should have been boring but wasn’t. He explained why his show was good: “In most TV series, 50 percent of the time is spent working on the show, 50 percent of the time is spent dealing with personality,…