Author Archive: Lisa S.
Thursday, March 21, 2013 by Lisa S.
Your Highness: I’m clued in enough to laugh at those parodies of over-the-top business jargon that periodically make the rounds… but I’m also quite aware of the need to keep my job fit in by embracing the specialized language of my professional peers. What’s an English major turned midlevel marketing manager to do? My dear [...]
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Tags: B2B copywriting, B2B marcomm, Beyond the Style Guide, cliché, clichés, Content Bureau, copy editing, copywriting, email, grammar, jargon, lingo, marcom, marcomm, marketing collateral, marketing communications, rewriting, The Content Bureau, thesaurus, word use, writing
Posted in Ask the Grammar Queen | No Comments »
Friday, October 26, 2012 by Lisa S.
Your Highness: I’m not much of a writer but, like so many of your loyal subjects, I have a job that often requires me to write. I want to be professional—and avoid embarrassing mistakes. I need an on-call editor. Or at least a cheat sheet. Please help! My dear Subject, Ah, English! Constantly changing, constantly [...]
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Tags: Chicago Manual of Style, common errors, Content Bureau, copy editing, copywriting, field marketing, grammar, homonyms, Letter writing, marketing, rewriting, spelling, style, The Content Bureau, typos, writing
Posted in Ask the Grammar Queen | 2 Comments »
Friday, June 29, 2012 by Lisa S.
Dear Maira, Is it OK if I call you Maira? Because I love you so. I love Benjamin Franklin’s fur hat, and your paintings of the hole punches and rubber bands and cherry trees, the one with the sea of flags and the one with Herman Melville eating a fried egg. I love all the [...]
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Tags: art, books, children's books, comics, democracy, design, exhibit, graphics, maira kalman, museum, portraits, reading, seeing, style, The Content Bureau, writing
Posted in Writing We Love | No Comments »
Wednesday, March 7, 2012 by Lisa S.
What you business types have always secretly suspected about writers and designers is true: We sit around in cafés all day, peering into our laptops and muttering to ourselves. Sometimes we take breaks to play Words With Friends, or to drink coffee and mutter to each other. All that muttering? Sometimes it’s about the joys [...]
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Tags: Chartjunk, charts, Content Bureau, data, Edward Tufte, executive communications, graphics, graphs, infographics, information, interactive pdf, marcomm, marketing, marketing communications, PowerPoint, presentations, presenting, slides, tables, tufte, visual
Posted in Writing We Love | 1 Comment »
Friday, January 20, 2012 by Lisa S.
Many writers cite Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the mother and father of contemporary poetry – or perhaps more accurately, as its queer, brilliant aunt and uncle. The two writers may at first seem to have little in common—Whitman is as expansive as Dickinson is compressed, as wild as she is precise. But they [...]
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Tags: copy editing, copywriting, Dickinson, Emily Dickinson, flow, meter, poem, poetry, reading, rhythm, sentence, style, Walt Whitman, Whitman, writing
Posted in Off Hours | 1 Comment »
Thursday, November 10, 2011 by Lisa S.
Your Highness: I hold a job that requires I write articles, press releases, and similar pieces in which I quote others. You’d think I’d have such matters down by now, but I’ll come clean: I never really learned the rules for using quotation marks. To complicate matters further, I’m a bit of an Anglophile—only the [...]
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Tags: American usage, British usage, Chicago Manual of Style, copy editing, copywriting, double quotes, email, grammar, Letter writing, marcomm, nested quotes, punctuation, quotation, quotation marks, quotes, quoting, rewriting, single quotes, style, typos, writing
Posted in Ask the Grammar Queen | No Comments »
Friday, June 17, 2011 by Lisa S.
Your Highness: I have a confession to make: I live in fear of the semicolon. As phobias go, I know it could be worse. I could have an aversion to, say, spiders, or maybe conference calls or my BlackBerry. Which would really be unfortunate, since I work in marketing. Anyway. I’m tired of worrying about [...]
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Tags: comma, copywriting, email, grammar, list, lists, period, punctuation, semicolon, style, typos, writing
Posted in Ask the Grammar Queen | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 17, 2011 by Lisa S.
I write poetry, and I publish it. Which means that I’ve been witness to a lot of bad poetry readings over the years. Great ones, too—but that’s not what this post is about. The problem with poetry, when read in public, is this. As with any art, there’s a lot of it out there. Some very [...]
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Tags: poetry, poets, presentation, presenting, public speaking, reading, speech
Posted in Off Hours | No Comments »
Friday, April 1, 2011 by Lisa S.
When those pesky demons get into the phone, the results are both embarrassing and (for once, literally) laugh-out-loud funny.
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Tags: autocomplete, autocorrect, copywriting, humor, iPhone, smartphone, spelling, technology, typos
Posted in Beyond the Style Guide | No Comments »
