Some of my work involves writing collateral and websites in English for French clients. I’m brought in on these projects because I’m an English-language copywriter. But recently I ran into an interesting problem: vocabulary timidity. In both cases, the French clients didn’t want to use perfectly good English words, either out of fear or incomprehension, [...]
Archive | text RSS feed for this archive
Pause for thought
I’m looking for a new car, so the other day I spent some time browsing a few auto maker websites. Overall, I found the quality of the content and interaction to be pretty lacking. Navigation was all over the place. Documents weren’t up to date. Car configurators were either too shallow or turgid. I couldn’t [...]
I'll never be out of a job
This poster was a great excuse to try my new mobile blogging software. I came across it at the Montparnasse train station this morning. “All our staff is at our disposal and will assist you in your whereabouts wherever you are in this station including the staff of the way-finding desk (near the end of [...]
Writing as design
Lately I’ve giving a lot of thought to the role of writing in experience design. It started with an article in the NYT that led to an article in the HBR by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO and a leading thinker in the Design Thinking movement. I then tracked down the author’s blog. It was [...]
Conversation killer
Even before it became mainstream, conversation marketing may be on the wane. For the past couple years, “the conversation” has become one of the hottest concepts in marketing — a way of helping companies embrace social media as a platform for promoting their brand, product or service. But apparently it’s almost old hat already. Some [...]
Clarity vs. Creativity
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the value of creativity versus clarity. Let me explain. Many a brief starts with a request for a creative solution to a communications problem, which is often a lack of interest in what the client is selling. It’s not appealing enough, everyone says. What we need is a [...]
Prune your clauses
Once I’ve established a tone and voice for a client in new marketing materials and collateral, it’s time to bring existing documents in line with the new writing style. So I’m often asked to rewrite documents drafted in English by non-English speakers, mainly French ones. It’s easy to spot copy that’s been written in English, [...]
They're losing me
I’ve been a (so far) loyal International Herald Tribune subscriber since I moved to France all those years ago. It’s one of only two snail-mail subscriptions that I’ve kept. I’ve always been a big newspaper reader because of the ritual (my emphasis). I also like the format, and for the most part, I love the [...]
