Ahh, New York Magazine. In Friday’s article The Low Road Warrior you find yourself getting swept up by a whirlwind of cries of political mudslinging. Be sure to head over to A Candid World if you want to cry foul about or heap praise upon the McCain Campaign’s new tact (and congratulate Ames on the [...]
Have faith in your coworkers, but don’t trust them. At a creative agency, you’re surrounded by talented people. Designers, writers, account executives, traffic coordinators and the rest. In a perfect world, everyone in your chain of command is smart, capable and insightful. But, as a writer, whenever I send corrections back to the designer it [...]
Have you ever noticed that:
When you nail a point, it’s the same as when you hit the nail on the head? Both imply precision, even though nailing a picture to the wall is much different than squarely hitting a nail once. Congrats on not hitting your thumb, I guess.
Then you can hammer something. If you [...]
“Show, don’t tell.”
At first pass, it’s the solution to 90% of bad writing. It’s such a vague, catch-all instruction that if you’re in a writer’s workshop, you can prove you critiqued your peers by writing “show, don’t tell!” all over their stories. Strident red letters work best. I prefer to replace the “don’t” with “not,” [...]