Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on June 12, 2013
“Martinis are like women’s breasts. One is not enough and three is too many.” —Winston Churchill Metaphor and simile are two of the best weapons for making business writing more vivid. In the example above, Winston Churchill, a wit and a writer of merit, manages both to surprise and reward us with his apt description [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on June 6, 2013
Lulu Miller, a writer/producer for Radio Lab, gave some of the best advice on how to tell a story that I’ve ever heard. Lulu said, “If you’re telling a story aloud, you have to make the meaning explicit.” Weirdness Does Not Equate with Story. The world is a strange place. Why else would villages be [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on May 20, 2013
When you’re pressed for time, it’s hard to write well. But believe it or not, it’s okay to write as fast as you can, churning out boring, repetitive, and overwritten drafts. Putting words on a page is always the most difficult part. It’s easy to revise them if you know these seven editing tips. They’ll [...]
Posted By Emily Warn on May 17, 2013
Guest blogger Michael Shilling writes for Microsoft’s MSN Music and now for Two Pens. Welcome Michael! He is the author of the novel Rock Bottom (Little, Brown and Company, 2009) and numerous short stories. Communicating is about connecting, yet the number one mistake that social media content producers and creators make is that they treat [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on May 13, 2013
Am I the only one who grinds my teeth at grammar mistakes involving that vs. who? This error crops up all over Twitter and Facebook, and a lot of e-books that haven’t been proofed by a copyeditor. Did you notice the telltale phrase in my second sentence: “that haven’t been proofed by a copyeditor?” It’s [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on May 8, 2013
One is the Loneliest Number in Any Design Brief A creative or design brief has to reduce all the things that could be said into the ONE SINGLE THING that is most important. Lots of product managers and marketing managers and client types try to wangle two or even three (!!!) points into the brief, [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on April 23, 2013
Nobody likes a creative review that sends people back to the drawing board. Having to come up with new ideas cost money and plays havoc with your schedule, but a few misplaced words can piss people off. Negative creative reviews, though, are a necessary evil and there’s a real art to doing them compassionately and [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on April 12, 2013
For those of you who are just starting out, I’ve put together a short list of the most effective tactics for writing content that gets read and followed on social media. 1. Strong Verbs and Nouns Rule. The rules of good writing apply to writing content on Twitter and Facebook and every other social network [...]
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on March 24, 2013
Scott Hanselman (@shanselman) and author of one of the most influential and globally read blogs on technology surprised me at a recent presentation to us Microsoft bloggers on writing content. He told the audience, “Twitter is a river of shit.”
Posted By Cynthia Hartwig on December 19, 2012
In my work training businesspeople at Microsoft, Nordstrom, Starbucks, and Costco, I’ve learned that storytelling presentations work powerfully to connect the speaker to an audience. That’s why I use so many stories in my seminars and, more importantly, why I pull stories out of my students with many different writing exercises. I demonstrate how stories [...]