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April 18, 1521, Martin Luther faces Emperor Charles the V in the Heylshof Garden to defend the infamous 95 Theses. Few people noticed the quiet banker in the room, simply known as “Jakob the Rich.” Jakob is a common merchant who will become the richest person who’s ever lived. Jakob will go on to accumulate a personal net worth equivalent to 2% of Europe’s GDP at the time. Jakob’s net worth is basically Bill Gates + Warren Buffet + Jeff Bezos combined — then doubled. Who the was Jakob the Rich? Why was he at Martin Luther’s trial? How did he get so damn rich? Well, he was a data-hungry banker looking after his investment. Over the previous 16 years, Jakob had been lending the Catholic Church money — and the Pope had racked up an enormous debt. In order to pay off those debts, the Church launched a campaign for people to pay to have themselves and their deceased family members absolved of all sins....
If you live in America, chances are you've heard (or used) the phrase "Don't put all your eggs in one basket."
Most of us know it means, essentially, that you shouldn't make all your plans based on one possible thing happening. But it's kind of a weird phrase, right? Have you ever stopped to wonder where it originated?
Its use in print has been traced to the novel "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes in the early 1600s, although it possibly was mistranslated to an inexact English idiom from the original and may have other roots in Italian phrases.
Different cultures around the world all have their own similar sayings — proverbs, if you will — that make sense to those who've grown up speaking the language but sound downright odd to anyone who hasn't.
James Chapman is fascinated by these sayings and how they translate across languages and cultures....
Awesome Copywriting Examples
Any description I write for this collection will pale in comparison to the excellent copywriting examples contained herein....
So a portmanteau is formed from two french words, "porter" which meanscarry and "manteau" which means mantle – a mantle is a cloak, the kind Anna wore in Frozen, or if you are a more traditionalist fairy tale lover, what Red Riding Hood wore en route to grandma’s house (to be honest, I’ve always thought it was a cape but I digress). A manteau is more of a clothes valet, which is exactly what it sounds like.
Put them together and you use portmanteau to refer to travelling bags or suitcases (because they carry your cloaks around?) only these bags are old-fashioned, made from leather and can open into compartments. Here are some examples....
A product description should sell.
That doesn't mean it has to be boring.
Sometimes, the best way to persuade is through clever and intriguing copy -- words so enticing they make even the most mundane products seem exciting.
The below examples of copywriting are just that. See if you can guess the product behind these seductive product descriptions....
The most brilliant writers and clearest thinkers I personally know have gone on to become lawyers, web developers, and even doctors. They wouldn’t be caught dead as content writers.
That’s a shame, because writing and developing great content is an incredibly valuable profession — and it requires a unique sensibility that is just as difficult and worthwhile to pursue. It doesn’t come easy.
But I don’t think everyone sees it that way — I’ve come across hundreds of writers who think they’re qualified to opine on behalf of my company just because they speak English.
Content writing still suffers from a lack of pride, skill, and craft. How do we change that?...
At the outset of each new year, humanity sets out to better itself as we resolve to eradicate our unhealthy habits and cultivate healthy ones. But while the most typical New Year's resolutions tend to be about bodily health, the most meaningful ones aim at a deeper kind of health through the refinement of our mental, spiritual, and emotional habits – which often dictate our physical ones.
In a testament to young Susan Sontag's belief that rereading is an act of rebirth, I have revisited the timelessly rewarding ideas of great thinkers from the past two millennia to cull fifteen such higher-order resolutions for personal refinement....
If you're a marketer, copywriter, or business owner, then you might be sick and tired of hearing the words "content marketing" by now. Without a doubt, this term has been one of the most frequently used buzzwords of 2014 and it doesn't look like there's any end in sight.
And, it's not only the undeniable overuse of the words "content marketing" that has grown tired to some people; certain aspects of the practice are starting to wear. We often see the same old blog posts, clickbait headlines, and unintelligible Vine videos popping up in our feeds and it can make us wonder if this is what the future of advertising looks like.
Despite the growing exhaustion with the buzz word, there are still creative, entertaining, and ultimately profitable ways to go about using content for the sake of advertising or marketing. However, in order to do so, you have to make sure that you're avoiding these four things....
When the masses only connect to the net without a keyboard, who will be left to change the world?
It is possible but unlikely that someone will write a great novel on a tablet.
You can't create the spreadsheet that changes an industry on a smart phone.
And professional programmers don't sit down to do their programming with a swipe....
About six months ago, Pocket Gems, a mobile game developer, launched a new platform called Episode. It allows writers to script a story and then turn it into an animated interactive mobile story. It combines parts of TV shows, comics, and novels, and provides the unique ability for readers to have some control of how the story goes.
I started writing on the platform almost as soon as it launched and have written three stories to date. My most successful story, Finding Mr. Wright, has built a significant audience in a short time. So far it has an audience of 163,000 readers, who have collectively read over 1,222,000 chapters of my story....
With the proliferation of technology, some people assume that writing proficiency is increasing and not diminishing. This isn't the case. One recent OECD study shows that despite having higher than average educational attainment, adults in the United States are below average in basic literacy.
How low? The United States ranked 16th out of 23 countries in literacy proficiency, with one in six adults scoring below level 2 (illiterate) on the literacy scale. Perhaps more troubling, college graduates demonstrate comparatively miserable scores. This means that degrees are beginning to create a meaningless expectation that graduates possess basic skill sets....
Now that TV is the place for serious people with long attention spans, we’re really in trouble
...Allow me to paraphrase. Back in the day, the powers that be had an imperfect but workable recipe for turning our brains in to nice steaming bowls of beef stew using television. But some people saw through that plan. Today, TV is really just as dumb as ever, but it is out-dumbed by the internet. When these two forces work together… Ding! Stew’s ready....
Because sleeping with the lights off is completely overrated, take a peek at these ten scary two-sentence horror stories!
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It’s on the tip of your brain. An idea. You think you’re onto something. You’ve figured something out that nobody else realizes. What should you do next? Write an idea treatment. I’ll explain how.
Any description I write for this collection will pale in comparison to the excellent copywriting examples contained herein.
Andy Martin spent much of the past year with author Lee Child as he wrote the 20th novel in his Jack Reacher series. Here he describes Child’s bold approach to writing.
Nobody really believes him when he says it. And in the end I guess it is unprovable. But I can put my hand on heart and say, having been there, and watched him at work, that Lee Child is fundamentally clueless when he starts writing. He really is. He has no idea what he is doing or where he is going. And the odd thing is he likes it that way. The question is: Why? I mean, most of us like to have some kind of idea where we are heading, roughly, a hypothesis at least to guide us, even if we are not sticking maps on the wall and suchlike. Whereas he, in contrast, embraces the feeling of just falling off a cliff into the void and relying on some kind of miraculous soft landing.
Of course he is not totally tabula rasa. Because he, and I, had a fair idea that the name Jack Reacher was going to come up somewhere in this, his 20th novel in the series....
If you want to make something that people really care about, that they actually give a hot shit about, you have to care about it yourself. Because if you don’t, then try as you might, it’ll come out in the final product.
The reason for this?
Making something is hard. Making something you don’t care about is even harder.
The only way you’ll be able to consistently work, when you don’t want to work, consistently try when you don’t want to try, is by deeply and honestly caring about your work....
Metaphor is not the sole preserve of Shakespearean scholarship or high literary endeavour but has governed how we think about and describe our daily lives for centuries, according to researchers at Glasgow University.
Experts have now created the world’s first online Metaphor Map, which contains more than 14,000 metaphorical connections sourced from 4m pieces of lexical data, some of which date back to 700AD.
While it is impossible to pinpoint the oldest use of metaphor in English, because some may have been adopted from earlier languages such as Germanic, the map reveals that the still popular link between sheep and timidity dates back to Old English. Likewise, we do not always recognise modern use of metaphor: for example, the word “comprehend” comes from Latin, where it meant to physically grasp an object.
The three-year-long project to map the use of metaphor across the entire history of the English language, undertaken by researchers at the School of Critical Studies, was based on data contained in the Historical Thesaurus of English, which spans 13 centuries....
On Twitter, Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats has compiled nuggets of narrative wisdom she's received working for the animation studio over the years. It's some sage stuff, although there's nothing here about defending yourself from your childhood toys when they inevitably come to life with murder in their hearts. A truly glaring ommission.
#1: You admire a character for trying more than for their successes.
#2: You gotta keep in mind what's interesting to you as an audience, not what's fun to do as a writer. They can be v. different....
Everything I’ve learned has been self-taught.
And I’d love to share some of my favorite lessons.
I’ve emptied my swipe file. What you see here is everything I’ve starred and saved over the past five years. If you want to learn more about writing for the web, content marketing, and the most persuasive way to communicate online, I think here’s a pretty good place to start....
I guess I’m in a metaphysical mood today. Thinking about writing for the internet, how it’s different, and finding your own style.
So, let’s set the scene…
Seth Godin, Lao-Tzu and I walk into Hemingway’s Bar & Grill. Godin says, “I’ll have a Purple Cow.” I say, in my best Homer Simpson salutation, “Beer me.” Lao-Tzu says, “Ommmmm.”
Drinks with Seth Godin
That’s me channeling Seth Godin, echoing Lao-Tzu.
Except I’m not a bald guy and I don’t wear saffron like either of these wise men....
Price still rules as an online purchase influencer, but basic brand assets should not be ignored in online product presentations.
Clear, concise, and pertinent product descriptions make online shoppers press the “Buy” button more often than do favorable reviews. In fact, only price topped persuasive product copy as a purchase influencer, according to a survey of 500 consumers conducted by Markettree for HookLogic.
Price remains king, with 84% of consumers designating it as one of the top three factors that cause them to buy. Sixty-three percent named product descriptions, and 49% listed reviews. Bringing up the rear were videos, named by only 12%. Fundamental brand assets like product names, images, and features, maintains HookLogic's survey report, are the bottom-of-the-funnel items most likely to turn browsers into buyers....
The key thing to realise, Pinker argues, is that writing is "cognitively unnatural." For almost all human existence, nobody wrote anything; even after that, for millennia, only a tiny elite did so. And it remains an odd way to communicate. You can't see your readers' facial expressions. They can't ask for clarification. Often, you don't know who they are, or how much they know. How to make up for all this?
Pinker's answer builds on the work of two language scholars, Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas, who label their approach "joint attention". Writing is a modern twist on an ancient, species-wide behaviour: drawing someone else's attention to something visible.
...Take a simple word, like “flash.” In all the dictionaries I’ve ever known, I would have never looked up that word. I’d've had no reason to — I already knew what it meant. But go look up “flash” in Webster’s (the edition I’m using is the 1913). The first thing you’ll notice is that the example sentences don’t sound like they came out of a DMV training manual (“the lights started flashing”) — they come from Milton and Shakespeare and Tennyson (“A thought flashed through me, which I clothed in act”).
You’ll find a sense of the word that is somehow more evocative than any you’ve seen. “2. To convey as by a flash… as, to flash a message along the wires; to flash conviction on the mind.” In the juxtaposition of those two examples — a message transmitted by wires; a feeling that comes suddenly to mind — is a beautiful analogy, worth dwelling on, and savoring. Listen to that phrase: “to flash conviction on the mind.” This is in a dictionary, for God’s sake....
You would think every company would prefer to communicate in a way that connects with the audience.
Yet, business writing often comes off as mechanical or at best perfunctory.
The crazy part is that it doesn’t take true expertise to write with a touch of warmth.
It’s more of an attitude....
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What I Learned About Business From the Richest Man Who Ever Lived. The leader of the Protestant Revolution, the Emperor, and the richest man to ever live walk into a room in1521.
Once in a while you come across a post that is rich with ideas. This is one of them. Sam Balter shares a very enjoyable, creative post. Recommended reading! 10/10