What writers & others say
Dilbert: “You missed the meeting.”
Pointy-haired boss: “What meeting?”
Dilbert: “The budget meeting that you told me to schedule.”
Boss: “You never told me when it was.”
Dilbert: “I sent you an email.”
Boss: “Well, obviously you chose an uninteresting subject line. Otherwise I would have opened it. You’re a bad email sender.”
Dilbert: “I also told you in person.”
Boss: “Boringly?”
— Scott Adams’ “Dilbert” cartoon
“No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.”
— Dave Barry, humor columnist
“coma factor: The degree of dullness of a meeting, presentation or reading material. ‘So let’s try to describe this issue in language with a low coma factor.’”
— BuzzWhack
“MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over. As in: ‘Reading these buzzword-laden reports triggers a MEGO effect.’ Also: Mine Eyes Glazeth Over.”
— BuzzWhack
“People will forgive you anything but being boring.”
— Patricia Fripp, San Francisco-based motivational speaker
“Most journalism trades in stories so dull and familiar that it makes the world seem smaller and stupider than it really is.”
— Ira Glass, host of the public radio program “This American Life”
“Truth is, I forget your pieces while I’m reading them.”
— Editor Ralph Metz, played by Alan Alda in “Resurrecting the Champ”
“The world is full of dry facts that lie on your spiritual plate like a slab of old ham.”
— Mark Morford, online columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate.com
“We put the blah in the blah-de-blah.”
— Ron Shewchuk, ABC, author, Writing and Editing the Internal Publication
“All styles are good, except the boring.”
— Voltaire, French Enlightenment writer
How can you tell better business stories?
Stories are so effective that Og Mandino, the late author of the bestselling The Greatest Salesman in the World, says, “If you have a point, find a story.”
Learn to find, develop and write stories that engage readers’ hearts and minds at Master the Art of Storytelling, our content-writing training workshop.
There, you’ll learn how to find the aha! moment that’s the gateway to every anecdote. How to start an anecdote with a bang — instead of a whimper. And how to use “the most powerful form of human communication” to grab attention, boost credibility, make messages more memorable and communicate better.
