Hiring a copyeditor? This is what to expect…
Hiring a copyeditor can be the best decision for your messaging. Yes, a copyeditor will help you maintain your credibility by finding the spelling, structural and punctuation errors you may have...
Good Copy Starts with a Good Copy Deck Template
A copy deck is a Word document with the copy for a piece. Copy will usually stay in deck form until it’s approved by all stakeholders, then copied and past-ed into the design. Interestingly, the term...
5 unexpected ways hiring a copy editor can improve your writing
When most people think of hiring a copy editor, it’s for finding and fixing mistakes before the piece in question is published with them, costing more than a few dollars to fix and making everyone involved...
2 Reasons to Avoid Keyword Stuffing in your SEO Copywriting
Keyword stuffing is when you overuse a target keyword. It’s among the more costly errors you can make in content marketing and search engine optimization for two reasons: readers don’t like it and...
Active Voice and Passive Voice: Differences and Benefits of Each
Grammatically, the difference between the active voice and passive voice is the relationship between verb and subject. In the active voice, the subject is performing the action. In the passive voice, the...
Hyphen vs. Dash — Getting Your Short Lines Straight
Those little horizontal lines cause more headaches than any other character. So we thought it might be easier to understand the “hyphen vs. dash” deal if it was broken down with examples of how to...
Design Agencies Are Leaving Millions of Dollars On The Table
Designers at design agencies have a unique ability to stare at copy for days at a time and never know what it says. To them, it’s another graphic element, as it should be. But what if design agencies...
Companies that care about customers use a copyeditor
Marcus Gee wrote a great piece in the Globe and Mail about dangling modifiers. This line jumped off the page for us: The smallest hint of confusion can give the reader “a breach in time to check mail,...
You are what you post: A social media warning
Social media is the great equalizer of our time. It gives everyone the same opportunity to share their views, thoughts, wisdoms and gripes — and people take full advantage of that on a regular basis....
Writing Advice: Take a Walk on the Wilde Side.
We get asked for writing advice all the time; from clients, students and the occasional family member. And while each request requires a different approach, some pieces of writing advice are universal....
A Great Tagline. A Great Company.
A few years ago, we were bouncing around the idea of replacing “Choose Your Words Wisely.” In retrospect, it was a silly exercise because we have a great tagline. But one alternative we quite liked...
The Ultimate Copywriting/Copyediting Playlist
In 2001, researchers studied how background music affected the quality of people’s writing. The findings showed that “background music significantly disrupted writing fluency” — a fairly cut-and-dry...