Language is fluid and subjective—what irks one person might delight another. Still, there’s something cathartic about naming and shaming the words that make you cringe.fd
Dead good one-liners
A well-crafted email footer from the RSPB the other week prompted me to think about the power of microcopy. It was on the thank you email for submitting my big garden birdwatch results – something I’ve been doing for years (and something which has now seemingly become...
Overly complex copy – why?
Imaging getting a brief of ‘make this as difficult as possible’? If it was a brief for an escape room, a maze or a crossword then maybe. But not in the world of copywriting. I can only imagine that overly complex was definitely part of the brief for whoever did the...
Reputation, reputation, reputation
Trust your gut. And if you’ve had a good experience somewhere don’t forget to leave the business a review!
Customer service words – the good, the bad and the reaching out ugly
I am not alone in feeling that some organisations are yet to recover from the pandemic. We were all (even if some of us to a much lesser extent) ‘patient at this very difficult time’. But, this current period of permacrises has everyone's nerves frayed and bad, or...
On social media, and OFF
Ssh, don’t tell anyone, but I watched the last hour of the Euro 2020 final on Sunday. I switched it on at 10 pm to see if it had finished, purely as I wanted to go to bed, but only safe in the knowledge that I wouldn’t be woken up by screeches of joy, or the other. So...
Don’t pinkwash this Pride
it’s so important to be able to walk the talk and back up any Pride merch with real examples of what you as a business/brand are doing to support the cause, which may be financial, political, or social.
Spotting email scams
Is the copy full of typos and/or written in clunky English? – probably scammers (though legitimate businesses do of course make occasional mistakes!)
The vaccine(s) and the comms challenges
Personally, I don’t think having misgivings and/or questions about a relatively new vaccine are baseless. It’s a massive exercise to get everyone on board and that means not just appealing to the anti-vaxxers.
This one time, at band camp….
14/5/2014 By Deborah Wroe Eurovision 2014 broke Twitter records. 5,384, 678 tweets according to @TwitterUK (https://blog.twitter.com/en-gb/2014/five-million-tweets-for-eurovision-2014). That’s a lot of people watching Eurovision and chatting about it. Now doesn’t that...