Great. You’ve finished the first draft. Now comes one of the hardest parts, checking your own copy. A quick warning. There’s more to this than simply going through the text for spelling and grammar, although this is obviously critical. If you’re self-employed or freelancing, there’s no getting around it. Copy checking, at every stage, is your responsibility. Make sure you factor in enough time to your estimates and invoices. Here we go. 1. Is the document complete? Check the

The ideal word count for a blog post? A quick search will tell you that articles between 1,200 and 1,700 words rank highest with Google. So that’s that then. From now on, all your blog posts will be longer than one thousand words, right? Not so fast. The magic number, let’s say 1,500 words for arguments sake, is misleading and here’s why. Just churning out long-form articles isn’t enough. Google doesn’t measure success by word count, a misapprehension that still lingers in ma

I’m still astonished when people say that business-to-business copy-writing is dull. Even more amazed when they talk about technology in the same breath. Perhaps I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most inspiring tech businesses of the past decade or so. Maybe it’s because I’m a geek with an arts degree who’s fascinated by the impact of technology on society. Either way, I’m obsessed with the way in which our world is changing, faster than ever before. And I get a kick o

Brace yourselves. Artificial intelligence is ganging up on content professionals again. At least according to this story from the Content Marketing Institute yesterday. Like most AI stories these days it comes complete with an ‘end of days’ headline and a warning that an army of robots is ‘creating’ content – hundreds of thousands of stories every year. It’s that word ‘creating’ that is most troublesome. Read the article and it’s clear there’s a huge gap between these data dr

Let’s start with bit of film trivia. Name a ‘director’s cut’ that is shorter than the original. Tough one isn’t it? The only one I can think of is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner which made much more sense once the infamous voice-over was removed. My inner editor is no fan of the director’s cut. Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Special Edition (Steven Spielberg) adds a sequence from inside the mothership. Surely that’s best left to the imagination? Aliens (James Cameron) offer

More than 10 years ago I started living on Twitter. I was off to run my first marathon in New York. Text messaging from a Samsung slider phone was doing my digits in. But back in those days you could text-message to Twitter. The idea that you could send one line to many people from a mobile device was genuinely revolutionary, and solved the problem of my aching fingers. I was addicted to Twitter in an instant and have been ever since. There’s more to this anecdote than nostal

A decade since the launch of the iPhone, it’s easy to take for granted the way in which it transformed communication, marketing and content. But back in 2007, the first-generation device was being marketed as a phone (yes really) and the app store and all that followed were far from becoming reality. But it was a revolution. I remember seeing my first iPhone in a passport queue in JFK airport in the autumn of that year. Compared with the incremental advances in mobile and ear