Dear husband, please stop
You can learn a writing lesson from my dear husband. It drives me crazy when he says to a restaurant’s hostess, “You don’t have a table for two, do you?” I nag him afterwards, saying “Ask a positive question, not a negative one! It’s easier for the listener to understand what you want.” The “go […]
5 tips for getting your experts’ cooperation when you need it
I heard high praise for the roundtable that investment marketer Anne Banks of gr8 communications moderated at the May 2013 PAICR RFP Symposium. Below you’ll find tips that will help you earn people’s cooperation whether you’re a financial advisor, marketer, or any person who relies on obtaining information from colleagues. I’m delighted to have had […]
Rethinking the traditional content process
John Refford’s tweets and posts about marketing technology caught my eye before I ever met him. I’m glad that Twitter connected us for some interesting conversations about the intersection between marketing, technology, and investments. At our last meeting, I thought, “I must ask John to guest-blog for me!” This post about content creation is the […]
Keep it short, but mix it up
Short sentences are easier to read. But many of us learned to write long sentences in what Natalie Canavor, author of Business Writing in the Digital Age, calls “pre-20th century writing.” The best writing mixes sentence lengths for variety, rhythm, and better comprehension. Modern and historical sentence lengths Canavor lists the following sentence lengths in […]
Top five posts from the second quarter of 2013
In case you missed them, below is a list of the top five posts from the Investment Writing blog during the second quarter of 2013. The success of “Q&A format for articles” surprised me because I wrote it to satisfy my own curiosity, rather than in response to a common marketing challenge. However, when Ragan.com […]