Fetish & Sex Scientist. Bizarre Ultra Vixen. Crash Test Mummy. Also a professional writer with a full-time househusband.

Posts tagged “copywriting

Unnecessary Redundancy

Redundancy by mlcastle

One of my pet hates is redundant language; I reserve the right to “really truly” for emphasis if I want to, but all that “05-hundred AM in the morning” stuff is for cock jockeys.

Here’s a little visual celebration of redundancy in action:

I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone

I'd prefer to prepay afterwards, by Andrew Sardone

Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker

Redundant Touch by JulianBleecker

Stating the Obvious by Hryck

Stating the Obvious by Hryck

Redundancy by mlcastle

Redundancy by mlcastle

Images via Flickr: Andrew SardoneJulianBleeckerHryckmlcastle


Image of the Week: Win A Dream Holiday

Belfast Telegraph front page

My mate posted this on Facebook. I thought this was ironic due to the fact this paper came out only a couple of days after the Costa Concordia tragedy happened (on Friday 13th January, woo00ooo), and just above the photo of the sinking cruise ship they’ve got a big red headline offering to win a dream holiday. Mmm, I think not. I wonder if they got in trouble for this ?

***** 4nim4l *****

Belfast Telegraph front page

Want to Win Image of the Week?

Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you must.  I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image.  That’s it.

[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word.  But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]


Image of the Week: Window disclaimer by Karen Neoh

Window disclaimer, photo by Karen Neoh

There are a lot of things I like about this. First of all, I’m just happy that somebody bothered to make up some nice professional looking signage rather than just writing it on a piece of paper taped to the window. That restores my faith in the quirked priorities of humanity.

I also like the fact that their offer of a puppy goes some way to ameliorate the threat to give children strong caffeine beverages. And look, if you don’t want the kids to drink espresso then don’t leave them unattended, right?

Window disclaimer, photo by Karen Neoh

You can see more of Karen’s photos on Flickr.

Want to Win Image of the Week?

Send me the URL to your image, or email me the file as an attachment if you prefer.  I’m on Facebook and Twitter and my email is mi@machiavelliid.com. Give me whatever info you like about you or your image.  That’s it.

[No guarantees that I'll ever publish it, or that I'll repeat what you say about it word-for-word.  But if I like your image or your thinking, it's in.]


Don’t be that dude, dude: Selling the Cloud [Video]

Don’t do that thing where you think that anyone who needs what you have will already know what it is.

Don’t be that twat who thinks “Duuhhh, you Luddite (or philistine, or newbie, or mouth-breathing meatbag 1.0)!” before and/or after every sentence.

Don’t assume that the only thing all those in-the-end-real people require is a targeted landing page iteration and autoresponder sequence.

Do use concrete data alongside, yes, fucking similes & metaphors; I love them.

Do allow yourself a little bit of mythos.  It’s “the Cloud”, for fuck’s sake.  Gods might be in there somewhere, playing What the Neighbours Did and sneering at our metaphysical shagpile carpeting.

But don’t overdo it.  No unicorns.

Do watch the video, it’s fucking ace.


Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1

Image courtesy of moonlightbulb via FlickrOK, back to this.  Johnny B Truant is now on Lesson 3 of The Tao of Awesome (which showed up in my inbox this morning); I am on Lesson 1 (just).  Meanwhile, I have a newly broken rib.  It only hurts when I breathe.

So here we go: Johnny will now take my avalanche of to-do and teach me to turn it into a manageable and less-fuck-up-able working system.  The secret is to do less things that don’t matter, and spend more time on things that do matter.  Cheers, Truant.

But he promises it’ll work, though easier said than done.  I’ll end up doing the important things before they become urgent, and dealing with urgent things according to whether they’re important.  Plus I learned that it’s possible to do business without being a slave to long pointless phone calls and meetings.  By refusing to have them most of the time.  Now that is pure fucking awesome.

The task for this lesson: make a master to-do list and mark everything on it as either “important and urgent”, “important not urgent”, “urgent not important”, or “neither urgent nor important”.

Dude, you’re hurting me.  To make a list of everything that needs doing would require me to integrate my personal Basecamp with my client’s Backpack with my 3 Google to-do lists and my Yahoo to-do list and my hard copy to-do sheets.  And the notes on my phone.  And my appointments calendar.  And all the unactioned items in my various email accounts.  And the laundry.  And the cleaner I promised the Animal I’d hire.

So, I admit I fudged this one somewhat.  My master list lists all my other to-do lists, and some of the most obvious and unavoidable to-dos (like work, pay rent, buy food) plus some special requests (like have sex, read Wired, book a holiday) .   It’s maybe 5% of the wildly disorganised to-do list that’s in my head.  Maybe I’ll build on it later.  Should’ve used my notebook instead of scrap paper.

The categorisation of each list item, though, was actually kinda fun.  Lots of stuff that was important AND urgent, of course.  But not all of it.

My crash test verdict on The Tao of Awesome: Lesson 1

This was pretty painful.  And that’s when I shirked by only listing my to-do lists and my worst to-do worries.  I hope I can catch up.

Let’s see what happens in Lesson 2.

Image credit: moonlightbulb

Absorbing the Tao of Awesome: Introduction

A few days ago I was trundling around Twitter when I saw this tweet from @JohnnyBTruant:

I have a new course. It’s stupidly cheap. You should buy it. “The Tao of Awesome” : http://bit.ly/myIt0h

I was sufficiently intrigued curious procrastination-inclined that I clicked the link. 

I wasn’t disappointed. Not talking about the course, you understand – it’s barely begun.  But I’ve liked that Truant’s style since the first time I saw his writing: blunt yet tangentially anecdotal, authoritative but not in a you-can’t way, with infrequent use of mild language.  Frequent use of the other kind, which I personally like cos it makes me feel comfortable.

I debated for a bit.  I asked the Animal, who gave his usual “I don’t want to tell you what to do” answer.  I decided the $39 fee might be worth paying if I get even a little bit better at keeping on top of things — work, baby, boyfriend, friends, blog, health, relatives, travel plans, oh godspleasehelpme i’mdrowning — and when I said as much on Twitter, the allegedly awesome dude replied to agree.  So I signed up.  Small fee, potentially good payoff; I’ll take that bet.

The course intro email arrived the other day, and I read it this morning (I’m always behind, with everything – that’s why I want to grok the Tao of Awesome, yes?).

So it goes: “change your life… get things done… get the RIGHT things done”. That’s a bit more interesting.  Some more motivational copy, and here’s the first official task: read the post at http://bit.ly/iupCeN, and grasp that progress is king while mere accomplishment sucks monkeys.  It’s called kaizen, apparently, though to my jaded corporate-whore ears it sounds suspiciously like Continuous Personal Development.

My crash test verdict on today’s The Tao of Awesome:

It brought to mind that proverb, “Thought without action is a daydream; action without thought is a nightmare.”

Which is fucking awesome, because ever since I first heard that saying it’s stuck with me on account of how it describes half my worldly problems in one sentence.  [It may well describe the other half, too; I can't tell because I don't even know what my problem is half the time].

Let’s see what happens in Lesson 1.

Image credit: Kevin.Qiu

A rant about toilet paper quality

I’ve got a stinking cold & am reduced to using toilet roll to stem the torrent issuing from my nostrils. This has led me to notice the scratchy-yet-structurally-weak quality of our latest multipack of toilet rolls.

We bought them from a supermarket known for its low prices and copycat brands. Let’s call it, say, ALDI. Bloody Aldi. Every time we go in there, we spend ten times as much as I expected and still come out thinking we’ve saved money.

The issue I have with their bogroll is this: the packet says something like “Super Softy Luxury soft toilet roll”. The paper is not soft. Neither is it remotely luxurious. Now I’m annoyed. All I really wanted was something cheap to wipe my arse on, but you promised me super softy luxury and you let me down.

When I buy cheap toilet rolls that are labelled “Extra Value economy rubbish” and come in basic packaging, I expect to get economy rubbish and I’ve never been disappointed.

Don’t make promises you won’t keep.

And don’t use cheap tissue when you have a cold – the pain is never worth the gain.


10 Ways to Work Incredibly Hard with No Results Guaranteed

I was recently informed that this is an example of a terrible headline/subject line that would put people off reading further.  Got to say, I totally disagree.  For one thing, you just did it.  Q.E.D., etc.

Also, it has a huge subtext of honesty and the potential for all these great results (though they’re not guaranteed, they’ve been mentioned; now they’re on your mind and the non-guarantee irrationally makes them seem more, not less, likely provided one is not a total lazy idiot.  Which one is not, of course, else one would not be here reading such a classy blog.)

Soufflé (image via Wikipedia)

Soufflé (image via Wikipedia)

So, as promised:

  1. Raise children.
  2. Do the big holiday grocery shop.
  3. Fall in love.
  4. Help the lazy.
  5. Give up sleep and food to make time for everything else.
  6. Make (and serve) soufflé.
  7. Blog outdoors at sub-zero temperatures in a howling wind.
  8. Count calories.
  9. Write an epic trilogy in a fictional language.
  10. Do your best.

I’m currently doing 7 out of 10.  How about you?  Let me know in the comments section so we can compare…