I recently visited the water mill at Mill Green, near Hatfield. If you don’t know it (and if not I can recommend it), this is a still-working mill that’s thought to have been there for over a thousand years. I had a long chat with the current miller/curator about the history of milling and grain […]
What Has a Water Mill to Do with Modern Business? Read More »
Promising and delivering are fairly central to any business. After all, if we don’t promise, no-one knows what we have to offer, while if we don’t deliver on the promises, our reputation won’t last long. So how does that apply to writing? The Promise Why should anyone read anything you write in connection with your
Promising and Delivering in Writing Read More »
There are very few areas of life that stand still, and web design moves faster than most. I’ve been in business for four years now, and the original design was fine back then. The site has had some tweaks, but the design has remained broadly the same. I’ve realised for a while, though, that I
Welcome to My New Website Read More »
Do you write blogs or emails that require the reader to scroll down? Or posts on Facebook that end in the infamous “Read more”? If so, there’s a good chance that not many people are reading them. People today have very short attention spans — and that’s by no means confined to kids. The reality
Compelling Your Readers to Scroll Down Read More »
A picture paints a thousand words, they say. Well, maybe. If the picture happens to be by Leonardo or Rembrandt, that’s doubtless true. Sometimes, a picture doesn’t paint a single word. In an effort to upgrade my filing system from the “lots of piles of paper everywhere” model, I today bought a number of cardboard
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There are white horses cut into hillsides all over Britain. They’re still being created — the horse near Folkestone was carved as recently as 2003 — but the oldest, and perhaps the most inspiring, is the White Horse of Uffington, on the Berkshire/Oxfordshire border. I visited it for the first time this summer, though I was
White Horses and Copywriting Read More »
Like most people, I sometimes buy from Amazon, and every time I do they bombard me with recommendations for other items I might want. This can actually make sense. If I’ve just bought a Dylan CD, for instance, it’s reasonable to think I might want other Dylan CDs. Even if (as is likely) I already
Blunt-Force Marketing Read More »
George Orwell has left a significant mark on how we speak and think. He’s given us phrases like Big Brother and Room 101, a yardstick to measure political manipulation and, when I was younger, an irrational fear of reaching the year 1984. He’s also given us Newspeak (and any number of similar coinings ending in
George Orwell and the English Language Read More »
A few weeks ago, I attended The Creative Expo at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield. It was a business show specially geared towards the creative industries, and I found it an excellent event, although it could have done with being better attended. At the same time, it was mainly (though not entirely) focused on
In 2015 we had a General Election. In 2016 we had the Referendum. And guess what, in 2017 we’re back for another General Election. A lot of us are fed up with voting and get cynical about the point of it. After all, whoever we vote for, we end up with the Government. If a