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How to Defeat the Tyranny of Bad Grammar and Worse Sales

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Happy North American patriotism week! With Canada Day and U.S. Independence Day, as well as an abundance of summer sunshine, I think we can all agree that the first week of July is a fantastic time to take a few days off. 🙂

With all of this patriotic vacationing going on, we decided to extend the enrollment date for our new sales training course by a couple of days … but we need to close it tonight, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern Time, to give Tim Paige and I the time and space to do an amazing job for our delightful group of new students.

You can jump into the course here: Join us for the Get More Sales with Webinars class, taught by Sonia Simone and Tim Paige.

(Naturally, there’s a money-back guarantee; there’s also a very wallet-friendly payment plan.)
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Quit Trashing Your Writing Voice with This Rookie Mistake

"For the love of God, stop making this mistake." – Sonia Simone

I’ve been thinking about writing this one for quite a while, but I’ve just had a lot of other stuff going on.

But I can’t stay silent anymore. We need to talk about a serious issue that’s impeding our ability to have the simplest of conversations.

No, I’m not talking about the fraying political discourse.

I’m talking about a tiny, useful piece of punctuation that two-thirds of the internet has apparently forgotten how to use.
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The Slippery Truth about Grammar Checkers

"It's almost an insult to the craft of writing." – Stefanie Flaxman

It was a brisk winter evening.

While editing a Copyblogger article written by Brian Clark, the sound of my fingers tapping on my keyboard harmoniously blended with the rain pattering on the window next to my desk, as the light from the full moon illuminated my computer monitor.

Then, as the clock struck midnight, something strange happened. My teeth sharpened, my rational mind diminished, and my hands turned into claws hell-bent on changing multiple instances of “who” in Brian’s post to “whom.”

Like many editors before me, I became a Grammar Werewolf.

The next day, I woke up groggy, with little memory of what happened … until I got a message from Brian via carrier pigeon:

“The whom is grammatically correct, but it’s bad copy.”

My heart sank into my stomach. Of course it’s bad copy.
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Stop Making These 12 Word Choice Errors Once and for All

"Write the correct words the first time, and you’ll spend less time editing later." – Stefanie Flaxman

Bill is at a wine bar on Saturday night, enjoying a glass of Pinot Noir.

After striking up a playful conversation with Lisa (who prefers Syrah), he asks for her telephone number. Lisa agrees to Bill’s request, and he creates a new “contact” in his cell phone.

“No,” Lisa stops Bill. “You’ll have to memorize it. I don’t want you to write it down.”

Bill accepts the challenge and confidently repeats the 10-digit number a few times aloud. Lisa proceeds to talk about her cat Nibbles for an hour and then leaves the bar after she realizes how late in the evening it has become.

By the next day, Bill has forgotten Lisa’s phone number. He remembers how much Nibbles loves playing with yarn because he used to have a cat that loved yarn … and although he wants to send Lisa a text message, her digits weren’t meaningful to him.

The same thing happens when you memorize the definitions of two similar words instead of learning how to use them.
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Pet Peeves from the Copyblogger Editorial Team, and What they Reveal

"No one can nurse a good peeve quite like a group of writers." – Sonia Simone

We’ve written quite a bit lately about identifying core values in your content.

Creating content around a positive value like integrity, fairness, humility, or faith will attract an audience that shares those values — and that fosters a powerful sense of unity.

But our friend negativity bias tells us that the flip side of that will probably be more compelling. In other words, talking about the things that bug you will build an even faster bond with your audience.

For today’s post, I asked our editorial team to let us know their peeves — the things that irritate, bother, and annoy them.

I’m going to try to tease those out and figure out the values behind them — and see what that might say about who we are as a company and a community.

So let’s get peevy.
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How to Use a Comma

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On this episode of Editor-in-Chief, host Stefanie Flaxman continues her Editorial Standards series with a lesson about correct comma usage.

Commas are often underused or overused. Do you know how to implement the right balance in your writing?

When punctuation marks are used correctly, readers take them for granted — they are merely symbols that seamlessly guide readers through your text.

And there are consequences when punctuation marks are used incorrectly.

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