1. The comma. All of us were taught in school to use commas to separate items in a list: milk, bread, and eggs. But some journalists had to go and wreck things and get rid of that last comma, known as the serial comma. Why? Who knows? There are various arguments about clarity and redundancy and even bulky sentences. It definitely makes sentences like “The selection of sandwiches includes turkey, watercress, tuna and peanut butter and jelly” a little confusing…and not always appetizing.

2. The single space. Once upon a time, every sentence had two spaces at the end of the next sentence. Now most journalists use just one. Again, the logic is fuzzy. Some say it’s because computers can adjust the space after a sentence’s ending punctuation so one need not worry about sentences bumping together illegibly. All I know is that nothing is more annoying than editing someone’s work and removing all their extra spaces…only to have them edit them right back in on the next draft. Oy…

3. The paragraph. A paragraph is supposed to be composed of a topic sentence and some supporting statements—maybe four or five sentences, right? Wrong. Paragraphs exist because it’s too hard for the human eye to read long blocks of text. So, journalists break things up early and often. People don’t read newspapers like they do books or even magazines—their eyes roam and wander. Newspapers are scanned and perused; books and magazines are read. So journalists write in choppy paragraphs of sometimes just one sentence so the eye doesn’t get bogged down in the column.

4. The essay. Speaking of paragraphs, remember writing the classic five-paragraph essay on, say, George Washington in elementary school? You had your introductory paragraph, three paragraphs in the body, and then the conclusion, which often restated much of the introduction. You put your good stuff in the second paragraph—like how Washington defeated the British at Yorktown. Well, forget everything you learned. Journalists stick the good stuff right at the beginning. Putting the good stuff in paragraph two is called “burying the lede” (and “lede” is another story in and of itself). And a conclusion? Never. The story just ends. Why repeat yourself? You may as well start using extra commas and spaces, as if ink grew on trees.

Why is this? Again, newspapers are scanned and perused. If a reader only makes it halfway through the story and gets bored (or, more likely, an editor chops the story in half to make room for a mattress ad), at least they’ve gotten the most important facts.

5. Quotations. Many journalism students are shocked to learn that you can quote people in an article and not write down what they actually said. That’s right. As long as you’re close and the meaning is the same, it’s considered an accurate quote. This is probably because journalists, like cavemen, once took notes with pencil and paper. Today, in the era of the HD cell phone videos, we know what everyone says, so this rule is a little antiquated.

I could go on…but you get the point. The do’s and don’ts of writing, like other disciplines, continually change. It’s neither good nor bad. It just is…

First edits are often straightforward. It’s usually clear if a paragraph is blatantly out of place, a word misspelled, or a closing quotation mark missing. What becomes harder is second (and third) round edits when an editor (or the writer themselves) must decide which facts or ideas make it into the final cut and which don’t. Here are five tips for editing content successfully:

1. Edit with an axe, not a scalpel. If you need to pare a 600-word piece down to 500, don’t try tricks like shortening every sentence by one word or other gimmicks. Simply find the least important idea and pare it out en masse, rather than damaging the integrity of the writing in the rest of the piece.

2. Be smart with language. Avoid jargon, acronyms and overused phrases such as “in the end,” “to be honest,” etc. Write in the active tense, and keep sentences short and to the point. Avoid “shoulds” and “musts”. They sound too preachy.

3. Remember the point. It’s easy for authors to get off point with an amusing anecdote or some other bit of verbiage that while entertaining, isn’t really relevant. Ask the question, “so what” after every sentence or paragraph. If you can’t answer the questions in a meaningful way, delete the content and start again. That’s what having respect for the reader is all about.

4. Get to the point. Old-school journalists called it “burying the lead.” It’s what happens when writers don’t get to the point soon enough, burying it under an introduction. And introductions are usually chock full of information everyone already knows. If an article begins, “Technology changes rapidly in today’s fast-paced world,” it’s time to hit the delete key.

5. Remember the author. There is almost always more than one right way to do something. If you gather 10 authors in a room and ask them to report on something, you’ll get 10 articles, all different, and all of which may tell the story well. Remember to keep the author’s personality alive in the piece. Just because you wouldn’t write something a certain way doesn’t necessarily mean it’s wrong.

What hasn’t been written about as much is Jobs’ human side—his driven personality that often set him at odds with coworkers, his abrupt management style…even rumors of firing employees in elevators only to have a subordinate contact them later to say they could keep their positions.

That’s not to say Steve Jobs was a bad person. But he was human, complete with flaws and prone to make mistakes, just like the rest of us.

Events like Jobs’ passing almost always have lessons that can be applied to the craft Trade Press Services practices: writing.

Like Jobs and every other great leader, great writing has personality. It inspires. It can be visionary. It can stake a course that others say will surely fail, only to succeed beyond expectations. Or it can fail miserably. It can be abrupt, insulting, offensive and sometimes too honest.

Do these statements sound like the people you admire? Like John Kennedy, whose words could drive mankind to set foot on the moon, but whose personal life included secret affairs and private liaisons with movie stars. Or perhaps Martha Stewart, whose business savvy took her to the top of several empires, but who was brought down by greed and scandal.

The lessons that writers can learn from Jobs’ death are not the obvious ones—the ones learned from his commencement addresses and interviews about striving and “going for it.” The lesson for writers is to make sure your writing is alive with personality. Like those who inspire and motivate us, writing must be full of character: frown lines, wrinkles, toothy smiles, unmanageable coifs ala Einstein and Twain, outrageous statements, lies, truths, humor, anger, fear, greed, hate and love. Like the people who inspire us, your writing should be human.

That’s what separated Steve Jobs from other CEOs, many of whom are widely disliked and distrusted in these bad economic times. Jobs was human and was never afraid to show it.

BREAKING: Witnesses reporting screams and gunfire heard inside Capitol building

And then it didn’t post anything for 10 minutes—an eternity in cyberspace after posting a headline like that.

If you headed to the Onion’s website, you saw a story about a dozen Congressmen taking a class of schoolchildren hostage. A false story, thankfully. Satire, meant to poke fun at a dysfunctional legislative branch whose approval numbers are lower than the thermometer on a January morning in Alaska.

Now, this is hardly the first time the Onion has posted content that rode the razor’s edge of good taste. And really—who looks to the Onion for their news reporting?

But there’s no doubt that more than a few hearts skipped a beat this morning when readers saw that headline. Maybe they didn’t notice the source. Maybe they had children on a field trip to the capitol Thursday morning. And there have been occasions in the past when non-traditional sources end up reporting hard news, simply because they’re on the scene when it happens. Anyone who was watching the 1989 World Series between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants can remember when the Bay Area earthquake hit, and watching sportscasters Al Michaels and Tim McCarver report on what had happened simply because they were there and on live national TV. They said “This is not a sports story…”

So, yes, the Onion went too far. In 2011, when reports of guns in schools and terrorist attacks on government buildings around the world are far too common, the Onion went too far.

In March of 2010, TPS blogged about using humor in business communications. Our observations then hold true now:

…if not handled with tact, comedy can backfire and ruin an otherwise fine piece of writing…As Shakespeare, himself no stranger to satire and the clever use of humor, wrote in Henry IV, “The better part of valour is discretion.” When in doubt, don’t.

A well-crafted response can help to prevent further damage to your brand and protect your customer base. Likewise, a poorly-written response can erode your customer base, damage your brand and position your company as “whining.” Here are some steps you can take to make certain your response is a winning one.

1.  To respond or not respond? Sometimes, the best response is no response. If an opinion piece or story is so over-the-top that a rational reader won’t give it any credence, then the “ignore and it will go away” approach may be best. There’s no need to give a lousy article any more attention that it deserves by dignifying it with a response.
2. What’s the response? If your company does decide to respond—and depending on the size of the company, this decision may be made at any of several levels—what will the response be? Analyze the offending work and determine the most egregious errors. If you choose a letter to the editor as a response, your word count will likely be quite limited. You’ll need to address only the key faults. With an op-ed, you’ll have more room to expand on your points and address lesser points as well.
3. Be factual. Point out what’s incorrect about the offending piece. The goal is to set the record straight.
4. Don’t make it personal. Remember, lowering yourself to name-calling and excessive sarcasm doesn’t help your cause, and may result in the letter or op-ed being rejected outright by the publication’s editors.
5. Let it sit. Whoever is assigned to craft the response within the organization should do so, and then let it sit for a day. He or she should then go back to the work, review it for errors #3 and 4 above, and then get final approval of the response from the necessary manager. This might be the marketing director, the corporate communications director, the CEO or someone else, depending on the size of the company and your corporate structure.

By carefully drafting up a smart response, your company can turn bad press into a home run. And you don’t have to do it alone—Trade Press Services is expert at crafting all kinds of communications for your company. Call us at (805) 496-8850 or e-mail gerri@tradepressservices.com today.

This is remarkable, considering that when Google began offering news as one of its many services about ten years ago, it made great hoopla over the fact that no actual humans were involved in the assembling of the news on google.com. The company that invented the world’s leading Internet search algorithm would rely on news aggregation algorithms to determine what was newsworthy.

But now, Google will partner with editors from leading news providers such as the New York Times, LA Times and Reuters to select “Editor’s Picks” that will appear in Google news.

This turnabout is especially important for several reasons. Occasionally, Google (and Yahoo, and others) will grab onto off-the-wall stories from Russian tabloids detailing a Siberian farmer’s encounter with space aliens, or something equally bizarre that should have never made it past the computer news selector. Slightly less annoying is the search engines picking up a story in a foreign English-language newspaper (such as Xinhua) that was probably told just as well (and without government censorship) in the Washington Post.

Lastly, the whole notion of “the more news, the better” that’s taken over the media ever since the advent of 24-hour cable news and the global spread of the Internet has not been healthy for us humans. Rather than news being carefully filtered by knowledgeable editors, it’s simply tossed out to the masses like chum over the side of a fishing boat.

Fox News says “We report, you decide,” but sometimes we need news editors to decide what’s news and what’s not, or what’s opinion and what’s fact. In these days of mass hysterias, Wall Street panics, left vs. right and a general overload of people telling us what to do and how to think, we could use a little less news. Or barring that, we could use more credible news.

So, Kudos to Google—and here’s to their experiment in having actual people write the news.

Muddled title: This is especially important when considering an article in a trade journal. Authors may not have control over the headline in general interest magazines or newspapers, however, a well-crafted title can mean the difference in whether or not the article is read or ignored. It should be catchy and captivating, but not trite.

Poor content and writing: This should go without saying. The main benefit of great content in the digital age is that it can be shared rapidly with others who may be interested. The opposite is also true—poorly written content can make you, your company and your brand the subject of scorn.

Graphic support: Most design decisions are left up to the publication when it comes to articles, but well-crafted charts and graphics that the author provides can enhance a piece and make it more likely to catch the reader’s eye.

Poor distribution: The publication in which the article is placed is just as important as any of the above criteria. If your target audience isn’t reading the publication in which your article will appear, you’ve wasted your time.

No market: It’s important that your content is relevant: both timely and of value to the reader. If your subject is old news or doesn’t provide takeaways that benefit the reader, then it’s time to select another topic.

Trade Press Services can help you craft articles and publish books that score high marks on all of these points. E-mail us today or call us at (805) 496-8850.

Then, over a decade ago, the country underwent a change. “You and I” came into vogue, but in the predicate of the sentence, as the object. “The police officer wants to speak with you and I.” It’s not grammatically correct, but it’s what people said. In the 1990s, Tom Cochrane sang “There was a distance between you and I” in his hit “Life is a Highway.” I still cringe.

(At the same time, notorious Watergate conspirator and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy opened each segment of his radio show with the phrase, “It is I, the G-Man!” His grammar was more in line than his behavior.)

So how does one know which to say, “me” or “I”? Or “he” or “him”? There are a few ways you can look at it.

If you’ve studied a language such as Latin, you know that words get different endings if they’re in the nominative case (the subject of the sentence) or the accusative or dative cases (the object or indirect object). It’s sort of the same with English. If a pronoun is the subject, it’s always “I,” “he,” “she,” “we” or “they.” If a pronoun is the subject or indirect object, it’s always “me,” “him,” “her,” “us” or “them” For example, “I (the subject) left him (the object) with her (the indirect object).

Another way to determine which pronoun to use is to drop one of the pronouns and see if the sentence sounds correct. “The police officer wants to speak with I” clearly isn’t right; neither is “Why don’t me go to the movies?” In these cases, you’d need to switch to “me” and “I,” respectively.

A third technique is to consider the verb “to be” as an equal sign. In other words, whatever is on either side of the verb has to be the same. So you couldn’t say “The winners are Bob and me” because “winners” is the subject, and you’d need a subject pronoun after the verb “are” (a form of “to be”). The correct grammar has to be “The winners are Bob and I.” A good test is to reverse the sentence, or flip-flop the nouns on either side of the verb. “Bob and I are the winners” sounds correct.

It takes some practice and may seem awkward at first, but getting this right is just one more way to improve your writing.

You know what an emoticon is: a portmanteau of “emotion” and “icon,” an emoticon is a two or three-character grouping that expresses emotion. For example, :) is a happy face, and :( is a frown. Used in a sentence, an e-mailer might type,

I found a million dollars today :) but then I was hit by a bus :(

(For an exhaustive list of emoticons, click here.)

Some emoticons are harder to interpret than a poorly conceived vanity license plate and are annoying for that reason. And others view emoticons as a sign that the writer is being flirtatious. Is it really appropriate to wink at someone ;) in an e-mail? Then there are the internet acronyms—LOL, FTW, ROFL, etc., etc.

Heaven forbid any of these creep into professional e-mails or worse, written correspondence, which in today’s world is increasingly reserved for the really important stuff, like contracts and legal notices. You’re being sued. :(

For too many people, emoticons are a crutch for their writing. Good writing should stand on its own, without the need for emoticons or cutesy acronyms. After all, if it’s not obvious that your intent is to be funny, serious or really drive home a point (sans emoticons), then maybe you need to redraft your work and make better use of effective language to express your meaning.

After all, can you imagine Mark Twain using emoticons?

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. :)

Most of us don’t remember when Detective Joe Friday from television’s Dragnet series in the 1950s said, “All we want are the facts, ma’am,” but it (and its truncated version, “Just the facts, ma’am) have become a pop culture buzz-phrase that has survived for more than a half-century. Ironically, the early days of television (and radio) were a time when products could be sold based on the believability of the actor in the commercial (“I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV”) rather than the veracity of the claims being made. Did one brand of soap really clean better than the other? Did one car truly provide a better ride, just because the announcer seemed convincing?

While today’s consumer is still swayed by celebrity spokespeople and clever advertising, more than ever, consumers, whether retail shoppers or B2B purchasers, want the facts. Does your database provide a better solution for integrating the client information in my 36 offices spread across 13 countries and 3 continents? Prove it! In an age when companies rise and fall on the choices they make when choosing consultants, technology, or manufacturing equipment, glossy brochures and slick sales pitches aren’t enough. That’s where the case study comes in. It can prove to be a valuable asset to help your company show that its product or service truly lives up to its billing.

A case study needed be complicated, but it does need to be compelling and targeted to your audience. Prospective customers want to see that someone like them—someone facing the same predicament that they’re in—found a solution that worked. Your company may want to develop multiple case studies tailored to different product lines and market segments. Once you provide a scenario that the potential customer can identify with, a case study will explain how your company’s solution met and exceeded the customer’s expectations, and helped them meet their business goals.

Finding a willing subject for the case study may be your biggest challenge, because some companies are reluctant to reveal corporate strategies or to “blow their own horn.” Your business may want to offer them an incentive if they’ll let you use their success story in your internal marketing materials.

It’s also important to be factual. Nothing will shoot down a case study like overinflated claims or outright lies. When you do good work for a client, let the numbers—increased ROI, greater savings, improved efficiency, and so on—speak for themselves.

Trade Press Services’ team of writers and editors are experts in helping companies create compelling case studies that will help convince your potential clients that your product has a track record of real-world success. To get started on creating your own case studies, contact Gerri Knilans at gerri@tradepressservices.com.