"Beyond the Style Guide" Archive
Tips to share with your writing team—or use yourself—for more effective writing.
Friday, May 17, 2013 by Chris
The reviews are in for Inferno, the new thriller from The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown, and everyone pretty much agrees that it’s a terribly written book, which is nevertheless a page-turner and will make bucketloads of cash. Rest assured that if you borrow ideas from Dan Brown’s writing for your own communications and [...]
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Tags: Beyond the Style Guide, blather, Content Bureau, Daily Telegraph, Dan Brown, Dan Brown Inferno, Dan Vinci's Nunferno, echoes, jargon, machicolated battlement, The Da Vinci Code
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Wednesday, April 17, 2013 by Nina
In today’s post, the serial comma—also known as the Oxford comma. For those of us who may become rather focused on such things, the debate about “serial comma, yes or no?” can be serious business. Commas are wonderful tools. They convey changes of direction, clarify sentences, indicate pauses, and flag upcoming dialogue. In marketing communications, [...]
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Tags: Aretha Franklin, B2B copywriting, Beyond the Style Guide, Chicago Manual of Style, comma, Content Bureau, copywriting, grammar, grammar purists, marcomm, marketing collateral, marketing communications, Oxford comma, punctuation, serial comma, style, style guide, The Associated Press Stylebook, writing
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Monday, April 1, 2013 by Kate
It’s spring, the season of new beginnings. And with the economy and employment picture also exhibiting signs of renewal, many marketers’ thoughts are now turning to finding a new job or upgrading their current position. If you’re among them, and haven’t run the job search gauntlet for a while, keep the following tips in mind before shooting [...]
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Tags: Beyond the Style Guide, Content Bureau, cover letters, job hunt, job search tips, marketing communications, marketing jobs, resume tips, resume writing, resumes, SEO
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Monday, March 4, 2013 by Eric
Every brand makes a promise to customers. For Apple, the promise is elegantly designed, easy-to-use products. For Starbucks, it’s that customers will receive the same high-quality products and service every time they interact with the brand, around the world. For FedEx, it’s that packages will reach their destination absolutely, positively overnight. Authentic brands are those [...]
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Tags: Apple, Authentic Brand Index, Beyond the Style Guide, bourbon, brand authenticity, brand promise, branding, Bulleit, Facebook, FedEx, Maker’s Mark, marcomm, marketing copywriting, PR, Starbucks, The Content Bureau, twitter, Yelp
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Tuesday, February 19, 2013 by Chris
Pity the poor civil-servant writer in France, who is supposed to follow the dictates of the learned men and women of the Académie Française when it comes to choosing words to describe the Internet and online activities. The Académie is charged with maintaining the purity of the French language, and in recent years, keeping English [...]
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Tags: academie francaise, hashtag, language
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Tuesday, December 11, 2012 by Chris
Email marketing campaigns live or die based on their ability to lure recipients into reading beyond the subject line—instead of hitting the delete key. In the wake of the election, President Obama’s digital analytics and email fundraising teams have revealed the tactics they used to convince fatigued campaign supporters not only to open emails, but [...]
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Tags: 2012 presidential campaign, A-B testing, Amelia Showalter, Atlantic Monthly, Beyond the Style Guide, Bloomberg Businessweek, campaign donations, campaign fundraising, Content Bureau, conversational subject lines, corporate marketing campaigns, David Axelrod, digital analytics, email blasts, email marketing, email marketing campaign, email marketing strategies, email marketing tactics, email scare tactics, email subject lines that work, marketing communications, Obama campaign, open rates, Romney campaign, Toby Fallsgraff
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Thursday, November 8, 2012 by Ruth
When is the last time you encountered a road sign with the words “Curvy Road Ahead”? More than likely, you saw a sign like this instead: This sign is highly effective. It’s clear the road ahead has twists and turns—and the squiggly arrow requires no translation. In the business world, iconography can be just as [...]
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Tags: Beyond the Style Guide, Content Bureau, iconography, icons, marcom, marketing collateral, marketing communications, messaging, SAP
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Tuesday, October 2, 2012 by Kate
They’re everywhere. Book jackets, of course, and ads for movies—but also, unlikely places, such as cereal boxes and sides of buses. Twitter is essentially built on them. Yes, we are surrounded by blurbs—short (usually), glowing reviews or micro-stories lauding this, that, or the other. When flooded with this many “inputs,” as a tech-y friend of [...]
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Tags: A.J. Jacobs, Beyond the Style Guide, blurbing, Content Bureau, copy blurbs, copywriting, marcomm, marketing, marketing communications, web blurbs
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Tuesday, September 18, 2012 by Eric
Once upon a time, it was a Mad Men world. Marketers worked by instinct, making enormous up-front investments with no clue whether campaigns would succeed or fail. Agencies grew more based on the thickness of their Rolodexes and their persuasiveness in pitch meetings than on their ability to drive clients’ bottom lines. Today, by contrast, [...]
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Tags: advertising, American Express, Beyond the Style Guide, brand videos, case studies, customer stories, famous ad campaigns, Federal Express, Google Super Bowl ad 2010, instructional videos, Mad Men, marcomm, marketing collateral, marketing copywriting, Michael Gazzaniga, Michael Pinker, social graph, storytelling, Super Bowl ad campaigns, The Content Bureau, Tom’s Shoes, transmedia, TV campaigns
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Monday, June 4, 2012 by Jane
The 2012 print edition of The Associated Press Stylebook has been published. This news may have passed with little fanfare outside the world of publishing and editing but it’s a cause for rejoicing among some of us here at the Content Bureau. The AP Stylebook is nothing less than the bible of editorial resources. You [...]
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Tags: AP style, AP Stylebook, Chicago Manual of Style, Content Bureau, copywriting, style, The Associated Press Stylebook, The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage, The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Style and Usage
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