Do they speak English in "Utilize"?!

I have given up trying to stop this ridiculous practice in business communications.
Here is the copy editor I have brought in.
He is a communications specialist.

Here is the original context, from Pulp Fiction.
[language and violence notice]

Word is not a vessel for emailing images

Please do not threaten the mental health of the web developers and graphic designers in your life.

• Send them images as separate files.
• Send them in their original (large) format. 
• Better yet, ask them first. 

Let us message against Philip

When I write an advertisement, I don't want you to tell me that you find it creative. I want you to find it so interesting that you buy the product. When Aeschines spoke, they said, "How well he speaks." But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, "Let us march against Philip."

—David Ogilvy

Data-driven in the Depression

In case you've been curious about the density of Ladies Home Journal and/or Saturday Evening Post subscriptions in Memphis in 1932.

Red = at least 1 in 3 families subscribed.

Google AdWords Certification

My Google Adwords Certification course is really starting off with a bang.
At least one of these three "X" people is younger than me.

A.I. is easy. A.V. is not.

This is kind of the way I felt when I got my first iPod. But I have to give this guy credit for operating his reel-to-reel, in front of an audience of VIPs, without looking at the interface. (Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

Don't let Stanley Kubrick design your web content!

"So, I went to that company's site," the business reporter told me. "What do they do?"
 Ouch! 
I was embarrassed by that question about my PR client and frustrated that I had little or no input on their site's content. All key pages on the niche BPO provider's site were dominated by slogans, vision statements, mission statements, graphics of world maps, etc., but no clear description of what specialized services they provided.

To put it in terms of science fiction movies, the reporter needed to see a web site that read like Star Wars, but her  experience was more akin to watching 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I'm a fan of Stanley Kubrick's movies and Arthur C. Clarke's novels, but I thought the famous 1968 collaboration between the two suffered from serious gaps in story-telling. Kubrick meant to take a non-verbal approach to the movie, reaching the viewer at a visual or visceral level rather than through conventional narrative.

"Past-Perfect Storm" on the Mississippi River

"I crawled back down to the water's edge because I was afraid to stand with the wind roaring so hard. Then I immersed myself in the river like a scared possum."

Prepping for a Boy Scouts campout, I was looking up John Ruskey's recipe for "Raft Potatoes" that I included in a 2000 Memphis Flyer article about his Mississippi River canoe guide service, Quapaw Canoe Co. When I turned in the article to Flyer editor Bruce VanWyngarden, he asked for two additions: The recipe (since I mentioned it in the story) and an account of danger on the river. I emailed John, and he promptly sent me a thousand-word paragraph describing a storm he kayaked through four years earlier. I added line breaks and moved the paragraph order around where it made sense. The raft-potatoes recipe is at the bottom of this post.

Pete Savage's 6 copywriting tips everyone should know

Here are six essential copywriting tips you should know, from Pete Savage, co-founder of The Wealthy Freelancer.
The beauty of these six tips in particular is that it's rather easy to identify when they are missing from a sample of copy.

1. "You" can make a difference. The word "you" is perhaps the most important word in copywriting because it involves the reader with your message. So instead of writing about what your company offers, write about what the customer gets. Whenever you're tempted to write something like, "We offer the most advanced...", stop. Instead, begin the sentence with "You" as in, "You get the most advanced...".

The REAL value of writing, for corporations

My favorite, most heavily copied (via photocopiers and Cntrl-C) and shared HBR article. Lucky for both of us, it's very brief.

from the Harvard Business Review
by Jack Shulman

EXCERPT:
Companies spend whatever it takes to develop intellectual assets. At the same time, they routinely seek to minimize their investment in the technical and procedural documents that tell people how to use those assets.  Such metainformation as instruction manuals, process descriptions, and procedure guides script the experience of customers and the performance of suppliers and employees. Yet companies view the creation of this information as, at best, a cost of doing business and, at worst, something they can safely ignore.

Good writers can change all that. What's more, good writers who are consulted early enough can improve the product development process and, potentially, products themselves. Unfortunately,

17 years later: Web Site Visitor's Bill of Rights

In 2000, the folks at Giga Information Group (now part of Forrester Research) published this document, mostly as a PR stunt, but also to foster better information design on Web sites. Seventeen years later, this list still has the power to shame Web site owners who still make it hard to figure out who they are and what they do or even how to have a conversation with them. 

In fact, before posting this list, I checked over my own site and made a couple of tweaks to be in compliance.

The Web Site Visitor's Bill of Rights

While all Web sites are not created equal, every Web site visitor deserves an acceptable measure of usability, functionality and privacy. In order to form a better user experience, we, the web users, analysts and advisers of Giga Information Group, do ordain and establish the following unalienable set of Rights for web site visitors:

The Right to Accessible, Basic Company Information
Visitors have a right to: