Know Who Your Audience Is!

When I was younger, I loved watching Who’s the Boss. One episode still stands out for me. Though the details may have become muddled with time, here’s the gist of it: Housekeeper Tony takes a class on advertising from ad exec Angela. His assignment? To come up with a commercial selling laundry detergent.

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ETR Insider Report: Slash and Burn

I had the chance this past week to pick the brains of two world-class copywriters.

Jay Livingston and Charlie Byrne were both in Baltimore for a conference I attended. We met in a ballroom of the Engineer’s Club. Beneath the soaring ceilings and baroque embellishments, Jay and Charlie revealed some of their personal secrets to writing money-making copy….

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The Evils of E-Mail Forwarding

“Some people just don’t care about their customers,” my friend Aileen snapped. “I’m ready to dump this vendor and find someone else!” She was fuming – and it was all because of a common e-mail mistake. The e-mail hadn’t been sent to Aileen. “Jennifer,” a wedding cake baker, had sent the nasty e-mail to Aileen’s…

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The Words You Shouldn’t Use

Sometimes the perfect adjective can make a sentence sing. Sometimes it can strangle the life out of it and leave it – and your reader – dead on the floor.

This is a lesson every writer has to learn – usually more than…

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Janus Words

Its an understatement to say that the English language is complicated. And in an e-mail to ETRs usage expert, Don Hauptman, Charlie Byrne raised one of our languages most prickly problems: words with contradictory meanings.

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