Just had to share this grammar blooper from PC Magazine’s Mother’s Day article. Perhaps, the magazine wanted to emphasize Mom belongs to you in superlative terms. Of course, I wanted to know what gadgets they recommended for us geeky moms.
When I first started doing casual game reviews, praising or picking apart a game came easy. Now, when writing game reviews, I feel like I’ve said it all before. The top 10 game journalism cliches (article no longer available) captures the challenges game reviewers face. Here is the list along with my comments. 1. Top … Read more
In reading articles and books — over time, I’ve learned to try to avoid beginning a sentence with “There” and using “is” or “are.” Doing this enriches your writing and encourages you to find more interesting verbs. Write and Drop or Substitute When I catch myself writing, “There are…” or “There is…” I complete the … Read more
Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action. It’s not just … Read more
When you read a book or article, do you “hear yourself” reading the words in your head or move your lips without making a sound (sub-vocalizating)? Doing this helps you have conversations while you write — without making a sound. I don’t know if it’s because I’m deaf or not, but I’ve always “heard” people’s … Read more
Nielsen addresses whether a site’s content strategy should use longer or shorter content. The best answer: As long as it needs to be. Even Nielsen’s own article is long and I jumped around to get its main points. Many experience success with both long and short articles. I wrote two versions of a landing page … Read more
Maybe because of my hearing loss, I tend to notice the slightest changes in facial expressions. I never thought anything of it until a friend mentioned it. She invited me to stay for dinner and I accepted. About 20 minutes later, I noticed her facial expression changed slightly. I told my friend that I changed … Read more
Some sites use flags to represent a language thinking visitors will click the flag that represents their language to view the site in that language. Well, do you use Mexico’s flag or Spain’s flag to represent Spanish? I don’t recall seeing a site using both flags. What about English? Some sites use the British flag … Read more
We Americans like to do things different. Who knows why. Most countries have adopted the metric system and list the date, month and year when formatting a date as in 24 July 2007. This causes confusion especially in the first two weeks of a month. Since my book, Brilliant Outlook Pocketbook, targeted the UK audience, … Read more
Tom Johnson offers a great writing tip especially for tech writers and others who write instructions. This method also works well with Web content and forms. Watching people use a Web site, a product, a service — anything is a superb way to get insight on how others use the product or service. Those involved … Read more