textgoeshere

Last week I gave a short copywriting workshop for the NCVO Membership Forum. It focused on copywriting for membership schemes, but there’s some good general stuff in there, too. Here’s an overview split into three posts.

Effective copywriting has three components. Writing compelling marketing material depends on mastering these three components:

Relevance: understand what you are offering, […]

Links to dozens of dictionaries, archives, encyclopedias, and language resources: ACES Reference Page.

Two classic columns by Jakob Nielsen are a bit misleading. To be sure, he has had a major positive effect on web design. In fact people still quote advice he gave eight (8!) years ago. It’s not out of date. But out of context, his advice on writing for the web consists of - at […]

Three scientists have confirmed a suspicion many of us have had for years: information can be negative. If I give you negative information, you’ll know less. So pick your words carefully!

The discovery, by Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, appears in the August 2005 edition of the leading journal Nature.

An introduction to their discovery can […]

It’s worth spending the time on writing punchy and informative titles for web pages.

Think about all the places the title might appear:

Top of the page itself
Your own website’s search results
Your own site’s automatic navigation
What’s new box or section
Public search engine (Google, Yahoo)
Email update
RSS feed
Printed publications
Your title is seen by more people than any other part […]

Here are some brief notes from my talk at the NCVO PR Forum.

How do you get the most from your website? Buy lots of expensive features? Spend ages making it look beautiful? The reality is that most visitors to your website are there for one thing only: the written content.

In this workshop I will provide […]

Streetmap is a simple UK streetmap search extension for Firefox. Just highlight a UK street name or postcode and right-click to launch a map of it from your favourite map service. 0.92 ensures compatibility with Firefox 1.1.
More info and download »

I’m running a morning workshop at the NCVO PR Conference called Getting The Most From Your Website.

The event is aimed at PR professionals in the voluntary sector. It’s not a long session, so I’m only going to cover:

Five strategies to improve your credibility
Three tactics for more effective campaigns
A surprise number of tips for impact writing

There’ll […]

This classic book is dedicated to Dr Onions. Onions was the original editor of the Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Allegedly, the book’s authority gave rise to the phrase, “knowing one’s onions”.

That gives you some kind of background to the author, Eric Partridge. When the first edition was published in 1947, scholars were scholars. The […]

Whether or not you agree with its politics, I don’t think you can fault the writing style of The Economist for clarity and precision. A reporter there told me that it took him five years before he wrote an item that didn’t need extensive subbing.

If you haven’t got the time, perhaps this book will help.

It’s […]