Creative Copy

Communicate, don’t decorate, for creative content marketing

Creative copy can attract or distract

“Prose is architecture. It’s not interior design.”

— Ernest Hemingway, Nobel Prize-winning novelist

Study after study shows that when you add interesting, concrete details to your message, people remember them — sometimes to the exclusion of less fascinating, more abstract ideas.… Read the full article

Why creative content marketing works

Make readers’ brains light up

After I presented a Make Your Copy More Creative workshop recently, an attendee pulled me aside. “The speeches I write are just 20 minutes long,” he said.… Read the full article

Why creative content writing is important

Grab attention, keep it longer, communicate better & more

My crotchety neighbor likes to quote his favorite philosopher, Anonymous:

“If a man speaks in the forest, and no woman is there to hear him, is he still wrong?”

… Read the full article

Paint word pictures

‘You’ll have your hand on your head with a knot under it’

My grandma and namesake, Annie B. Vrana, was an Oklahoma farm woman and one of the most colorful people I’ve known.… Read the full article

‘Don’t light your clothing on fire’

WCB-Alberta teaches safety through ‘The Hunger Games’

Some topics are hard to tackle. Brand guidelines, casual dress codes and safety, for instance, all come across as finger-wagging, nagging stories.… Read the full article

Examples prove the rule

Illustrate your point with for instances

You could say that in Cleopatra’s time, women had few legal rights. Or you could say, as Stacy Schiff does in Cleopatra: A Life:

[I]n a city where women enjoyed the same legal rights as infants or chickens, the posting called upon a whole new set of skills.… Read the full article