You're so vain, you probably think this piece is about you Richard Roll, an economics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies narcissism in CEOs. Turns out the more narcissistic executives are, the more likely they are to overrate their skills and make bad business moves. In one 2010 study, Roll used a simple technique that's been validated by … [Read more...] about Avoid Institutional Narcissism
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Hit list
Lists top the list of blog posts that get shared If David Letterman taught us one thing during his tenure as host of Late Night, it's that people love lists. It's no wonder, then, that when Fractl and Buzzstream recently analyzed more than 200,000 articles from June to November 2014, lists topped the list of top 5 types of blog posts that get shared: Lists. … [Read more...] about Hit list
Activate the passive voice online
Write subject-verb-object People understand the active voice more easily than the passive voice. According to Jan H. Spyridakis, author of "Guidelines for Authoring Comprehensible Web Pages," people: Remember active sentences verbatim better than passive ones. (Blount and Johnson, 1971) Read active sentences faster than passive ones. That may be because active … [Read more...] about Activate the passive voice online
Paint word pictures
'You'll have your hand on your head with a knot under it' My grandma and namesake, Annie B. Vrana, was an Oklahoma farm woman and one of the most colorful people I've known. When she spoke, she painted pictures in your head. What I didn't know then that I do know now is that word pictures increase understanding. Because Grandma talked in pictures, we could literally … [Read more...] about Paint word pictures
Master the Art of the Storyteller
Learn to engage readers with wordplay, metaphor, storytelling and more My husband likes to quote Anonymous, who said: "If a man speaks in the forest, and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong?" The corporate communication writer's corollary: If you cover your terribly serious and important stories, and nobody pays attention, does your message still make a … [Read more...] about Master the Art of the Storyteller