Drop the modifiers on Facebook Strunk & White were right, says viral marketing scientist Dan Zarrella: Modifiers aren't as effective as nouns and verbs. And now Zarrella has the data to prove it. Adjectives and adverbs don’t perform as well on Facebook as nouns and verbs. Zarrella learned this by analyzing his Facebook data set to study the relationship between parts of … [Read more...] about The verb is the story
Social media writing
End of story? | June 2010
"The internet has evolved a new species of magpie reader, gathering bright little buttons of knowledge, before hopping on to the next shiny thing." — Ben Macintyre, writer at large for The Times End of story? The news of storytelling’s death has been greatly exaggerated “Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here today to mourn the death of Story. As you may have heard, … [Read more...] about End of story? | June 2010
What’s the cost of ‘niggling’? | February 2010
"All that wasted motion of everybody putting in commas and taking out commas wasn't necessary." — Art Weise, vice president of Corporate Communications, Entergy Corp., after reengineering the company's approval process What's the cost of 'niggling'? Do all those tweaks really add value to the bottom line? First there was DBT, or Death by Tweakage: When a brochure or … [Read more...] about What’s the cost of ‘niggling’? | February 2010
Snip your sentences | January 2010
"(Martin) Amis has loosened his belt, and his slangy, scattershot prose veers toward self-parody. Sentences are either impossibly short or impossibly long. Commas, colons, parentheses and dashes crawl all over the page like flesh-eating microbes." — Jeff Giles, senior editor of Newsweek's Arts & Entertainment section Snip your sentences How long is too long? What's … [Read more...] about Snip your sentences | January 2010