Language Legends
As copywriters, copyeditors, proofreaders and translators, our heroes are people with a gift for words. In this new regular addition to our blog, we’ll be looking at the men and women whose voices transcend...
Five of the best speeches ever recorded
Most of our copywriting, copyediting, proofreading and translation work is for content that’s meant to be read. Once in a while, we get the chance to work on speeches and it’s such a treat. It’s...
Looking for a copyeditor? This is what to look for.
Ernest Hemingway famously said that the first draft of anything is shit. And he was right. This is because your first pass is rife with personal biases: what you’d understand, find interesting or deem...
Clever copywriter or too clever by half?
We used the phrase “too clever by half” the other day in a presentation. It’s one of our favourites. The wiktionary defines it as “shrewd but flawed by overthinking or excessive complexity, with...
Hello, I’m Memorable: 4 Keys to Naming a Business or Product
Let’s talk about what seems like the easiest thing in the world to do, but the hardest thing to do really well: give something a name. Have you listened to parents recount the way they came to their...
Long-form blog post writing — The primer
A funny thing happened over the past few years: long-form content has made a huge comeback. It’s funny because not too long ago, when the trend was moving more and more micro, the “experts” concluded...
Two lessons from an effective brainstorm
A few weeks ago, one of our agency clients brought us in for a brainstorm. It’s always a hoot to jump in on one of those, partly because it gets us out of the office and into a different environment...
You too can create a social media holiday
When marketing managers come to us for copywriting, we like to give them ideas that jump off the page instead of simply words that live on it. Creating a social media holiday would most definitely qualify....
Write better emails: 4 little things that make a big difference.
Three years ago, Inc. Magazine (a publication we quite like) predicted the demise of email by 2020. It’s a well-written piece and the points made are salient and well-researched. But with respect...
Three questions to ask a translator before hiring them
If you need a translator, you need a good one because language police dogs are always sniffing around looking for slip-ups. Offending the wrong person with a poor translation could lead to negative PR...
4 Tips for Small Marketing Teams
The small marketing teams we work with all have the same problem: time. It’s impossible to do it all, but in today’s world, you kinda have to: inbound, outbound, social, experiential, trade...
Good advice for parents buying children’s books
Children’s books are written and illustrated to be read over and over again. Some colleges have courses dedicated to teaching the best ways to drill letter and pattern recognition, phonics, syntax...