2 September 2008 -- Across the pond, supermarket chain Tesco made news yesterday for having changed the wording in the sign above its express checkout lines from “10 items or less” to “up to 10 items.”  Read our blog »

26 August 2008 -- Editing a piece of content thoroughly is not an easy job. Careful editing involves correcting grammar, spelling, and punctuation and improving word choice, structure, flow, and readability. Trying to handle all of these things at once would overwhelm anyone.

So, breaking up editing into separate tasks can help make the job of editing a whole lot more manageable.  Read our blog »

20 July 2008 -- When we return edited content to our clients, we want them to have complete control over what they do with that content. Some may be curious about exactly what changes we have made, while others may be happy with most of our edits but want to retain or make further changes to parts of the original text.  Read our blog »

2 July 2008 -- Since Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab conducted its research on web credibility over six years ago, countless writers have referred to its pioneering, and still mostly relevant, insight into how users judge organizations based on their websites.  Read our blog »

18 June 2008 -- Lawrence Downes writes a heartfelt piece in the New York Times this week titled “In a Changing World of News, an Elegy for Copy Editors.”

Downes laments the plight of the traditional newsroom copy editor, whose job it is to “trim words, fix grammar, punctuation and style, write headlines and captions.” He says that copy editors are a dying breed because their function—“to slow down, think things through” and “make sure that the day’s work of a newspaper staff becomes an object of lasting beauty and excellence once it hits the presses”—is incompatible with the speed with which news is published online.  Read our blog »

11 June 2008 -- Writers convey their ideas mainly through word choice and word order—“the best words in the best order,” to borrow Coleridge’s dictum about poetry.

One thing the explosion of the Internet has created is a demand for content that cannot be met by the available professionals. This demand has had to be filled by untrained writers, which has led to a lot of mediocre writing. Mediocre content serves its purpose in some cases, such as on social networks, but it detracts from the user experience in most other cases, particularly with news, blogs, and commercial websites.  Read our blog »

9 May 2008 -- Content editing covers a whole range of issues: structure, argument, style, phrasing, grammar. Sometimes, though, the smallest things trip us up — especially when we’re facing a tight deadline. Typograhical errors, or typos, can be the most damaging because they are so easy to make but can distract the reader so much from the point of the text.  Read our blog »

15 April 2008 -- Everyone now recognizes that the Internet is a revolutionary form of communication, on par with the printing press over 500 years ago. In the grand scheme of things, we are still in the early days of this technology, and it shows in much of the content one finds online. Some web content is, of course, very good. Much of it, though, can be choppy, confusing, and a little sloppy.  Read our blog »

25 March 2008 -- Other than word-of-mouth, nothing brings people to a website faster than a good search engine ranking. With the unending proliferation of pages on the Internet, optimizing your website to have a high ranking on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN is becoming all-important for some businesses.  Read our blog »

19 March 2008 -- Blogs and websites that provide advice on writing for the web often contain useful tips. Many of them point out that, because people read web content differently than printed text, the devices we use to present web content should cater to this new reading style.  Read our blog »