Sometimes (maybe often), a big or ambitious writing project can suffer esoteric emergencies. A writer might experience a crisis of confidence (or might suddenly birth a punitive inner editor). A writer might experience a crisis of interest (an initial effluence dries up). A writer might experience a crisis of life’s mundane (or monumental) messiness. Broken confidence, […]
We frequently work with organizations on collaboratively produced documents, from annual reports to training manuals to white papers and more. Coauthorship for these kinds of projects is inevitable: Large or complicated documents almost always require the expertise and input of people from different organizational vantages. It makes sense to produce these projects collaboratively, but it’s logistically […]
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startupby John Carreyrou If you haven’t followed the story of rogue startup founder Elizabeth Holmes, you won’t regret time spent googling. Holmes was a darling of Silicon Valley, propelled to media stardom (and billionaire status) in short order after the launch of Theranos, which offered seemingly […]
As longtime users of MS Word, we experienced some real pain when we began migrating to Google Docs. We’re not complete luddites, though, so we put in our hours, and we now embrace Google Docs with open (if slightly enervated) arms, at least for simply formatted, collaboratively edited docs. If you want an […]
As last week’s judicial committee hearings made very clear and very present, anger can be a very powerful tool of expression. It’s powerful when it rips the seams of expected rhetorical discourse; it’s powerful when it sears through the superficial niceties of extemporaneous speech. It’s powerful—sometimes even especially powerful—when it is expected and yet does […]
Happiness, if the long and prosperous history of the self-help genre is any indication, is generally considered a fundamental human aim. If we aren’t feeling it, and we aren’t striving for it, then we’re doing something wrong. But is that really true? Is it necessary to be happy—or, hold up, let me tamp down the intensity of that […]
For organizations or departments that don’t have a dedicated project manager, it’s no small thing to get big comms projects out the door. In our last post, we talked about how not to let the actual writing process gum up the works—namely, by allowing adequate time for writing and editing, and by uncoupling the writing process from the […]
The stakes are usually high for big communications projects such as stakeholder reports, grant applications, websites, and training manuals. These kinds of projects are often closely linked to an organization’s core mission, and they require a significant outlay of resources. In an ideal world, big projects are planned far in advance, with adequate staff time and […]
Even though text is everywhere, seeping into every corner of our consciousness and flooding our lives, books (if they’re good) still have this magic ability to float above the flotsam in a way that online pubs never can. That’s why we publish books, and that’s why we do everything we can to make them great. But […]
One of the more amusing (also, damning) cognitive biases described in psychological literature is the Dunning-Kruger effect. Described in Advances in Experimental Psychology under the subtitle, “On Being Ignorant of One’s Own Ignorance,” the bias holds that the vast majority of us think we’re better at tasks than we actually are. (Darkly) hilariously, our misplaced […]