I know how to solve the devastating apostrophe addiction that’s destroying Western civilization as we know it.
Writing & Editing
As entrepreneurs, many of us are gun shy about telling our customers what to do. We believe in letting them make their own purchasing decisions when they are good and ready.
It may sound egotistical, but if you’re confident in your ability to deliver a high-quality product or service, why let your competitors beat you to the bargaining table? Many businesses leave the decision-making entirely up to the prospective customer, but it doesn’t have to be that way.
When I was in journalism school, we students always posed the same question upon receiving a writing assignment: How long should the piece be? One professor – whose sauciness seemed charming back then – put it memorably:
“The right length for a story is also the right length for a woman’s skirt: Long enough to cover the subject and short enough to be interesting.” (I learned later that he apparently was paraphrasing Lord Arthur James Balfour, a Scottish statesman and philosopher of the early 20th century.)
A sell sheet is a high-impact, single-page presentation of your core capabilities, customer benefits, and contact information. It is a smart way to get your brand into the customer’s hands without the bulk or expense of a brochure.
When you think about it, sell sheets are a lot like superheroes.
Superheroes build their reputations around one or two specific qualities – strength, speed, ability to climb walls – and sell sheets highlight one or two specific services.
Shot from the top of the Centre Point Building (36 stories high) in central London over three days last summer, photographer Jeffrey Martin stitched together 7,886 individual photos into an amazing 80-gigapixel panorama that can be zoomed in and out for a view of London that captures, not only its overall grandeur, but intimate details like license plate numbers, faces, and wallpaper inside people’s apartments.
Robert Louis Stevenson said, “Everyone lives by selling something.” You sell yourself with a resume or portfolio. You sell your company news with a press release. You sell your ideas and expertise with promotional materials, website content and corporate communications.
In business communications, the power of words lies in their capacity to change behavior. Whatever your objectives, you can achieve more by choosing words that sell. How?
Writing for the web is the same as any other type of writing, except that it’s different.
