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Will it snow this winter?

November 11th 2016

Preamble: I wrote this piece for my ‘Radio for the Blind’ recording on 01 November, my predictions appear to have been prescient as we had a heavy fall of snow this week.  Well we are heading for it now. The clocks have turned back and I have lit my open fire, as I write the […]

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When manners obscure meaning

September 03rd 2016

I came across this piece of dialogue in Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel, Tender is the Night. Dick Diver, one of the central characters, says: “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect – you don’t call a man a coward or a […]

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Beware Content Blindness

May 10th 2016

The communications industry is obsessed with ‘content’. In layman’s language this means copy and visual material for websites, blogs, social media sites and internal briefing documents. There is an overload of ‘content’ and therefore a greater need for brevity and conciseness. Engaging audiences among the tsunami of non-stop communications has become harder to achieve and […]

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More copywriting mantras

February 22nd 2016

Less is more In these attention-sparse days, short-form copy has become the norm for many media channels from Twitter to Facebook, the web to broadcast news. Messages must be distilled to their absolute essence. I draw the analogy of boiling a stock pot: the final reduction delivers a rich concentration. Get to the heart of […]

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