Wavedash

1. 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 is my responsibility to make sure those corrections were made.
   
   More importantly, I have to check that no additional mistakes (extra commas, spaces, etc) found their way in as a result of the changes. If it goes to the client with a mistake the designer made based on my corrections, it’s my fault. Not the designer’s.

2. Looking stupid is bad. Who knew? It seems like 2/3rds of a creative agency’s life is spent trying to not look dumb. This goes well beyond making sure the client doesn’t look dumb. A piece may go to press with zero mistakes, but if the client had to point out three paltry errors to get it there, it reflects poorly on you.Even asking for clarification on multiple occasions gives the impression that you don’t know what you’re doing. Ask too many questions about their preferred style, or whether something would violate brand guidelines, and the client starts to get DIY syndrome. You must know the brand guidelines well enough in advance that you don’t have to pepper the account executive with questions.After all, the client hired you so that they don’t have to worry about the details.In life, this comes down to respect. You should never be afraid to ask questions, especially if there is a risk that you’ll get it wrong. But there’s a thin line between appearing careful and appearing clueless. If you’re always asking your boss how to open your email attachments, he or she will have a hard time considering you for a promotion.
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“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,” so I can refer to the phrase as SnotT. That acronym should tell you how highly I regard the overused criticism.

“Show, don’t tell” is shorthand for Immerse your reader in the story through detail. Turn your nouns, adjectives and verbs into people, emotions and actions. In Science Fiction, a particularly good piece of SnotT is called an eye kick, referring to vivid imagery that shocks the reader with just how futuristic the future is.

SnotT is absolutely necessary, and you should forget it exists.

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