"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:

Have WWII saboteurs infiltrated your company?

In 1944 the Office of Strategic Services (the precursor to the CIA) created the formerly secret Simple Sabotage Field Manual [PDF] for OSS operations officers

and resistance organizers living in Axis-occupied countries.

There are tips on physical sabotage common to insurgents, but the list of methods (and desired outcomes) for volunteers to interfere from within organizations reads startlingly like the dark sides of today's American corporate and government workplaces. The common weaknesses of executive and middle management as well as front-line workers (specialists, coordinators, analysts, etc) are clearly evident in this list of

 "universal opportunities to make faulty decisions, to adopt a noncooperative attitude, and to induce others to follow suit...may involve nothing more than creating an unpleasant situation among one's fellow workers, engaging in bickerings, or displaying surliness and stupidity." 

(11) General Interference with Organisations and Production 

• Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.

Tech sector ironies of the 2010s

from Phil Nash, London.

Welcome to the new decade: Java is a restricted platform, Google is evil, Apple is a monopoly and Microsoft are the underdogs.

My 1999 coverage of minor-league pro wrasslin' in Oxford

I was a contributing writer to Oxford Town from 1997 to 1999. That's the Oxford Eagle's free, weekly entertainment supplement, sort of a cross between the Memphis Flyer and the Commercial Appeal's GoMemphis. 

My editors included Rob Robertson, Jamie & Kelly Kornegay, Jimmy Thomas and others.

While they would publish just about anything I felt like writing, my most rewarding experiences were typical arts/entertainment/leisure assignments that somebody was going to have to write.

⚒ Pro Tip: The end of this post includes a glossary of pro wrestling terms.

Are You Ready to Rummbulllll?
Loudmouthed Wrestling Manager Issues Challenge to Ole Miss Sororities

Professional wrestling makes its defiant return to Oxford Friday night as the Dallas-based International Wrestling Federation stages several championship matches at the National Guard Armory on University Avenue.

“We want to see all the wrestling fans in the area come out,” said Mr. Sensational, manager of the controversial Sensational Stable, “including all our fans on your Sorority Row!”