Wednesday, November 27, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Saturday, November 09, 2013
The better you write, the higher you go
On September 7th, 1982, Advertising Guru David Ogilvy sent the following internal memo to all Ogilvy and Mather Agency employees:
"The better you write, the higher you go in Ogilvy & Mather. People who think well, write well. Woolly minded people write woolly memos, woolly letters and woolly speeches.Good writing is not a natural gift. You have to learn to write well."
Here are David's 10 hints:
How to Write
- Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
- Write the way you talk. Naturally.
- Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
- Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
- Never write more than two pages on any subject.
- Check your quotations.
- Never send a letter or a memo on the day you write it. Read it aloud the next morning — and then edit it.
- If it is something important, get a colleague to improve it.
- Before you send your letter or your memo, make sure it is crystal clear what you want the recipient to do.
- If you want ACTION, don’t write. Go and tell the guy what you want.
David
This, and much more of Ogilvy’s timeless advice, can be found in The Unpublished David Ogilvy (public library):
Wednesday, October 16, 2013
Robert Reich's Opinion
Robert Reich: The argument is that inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and poor. The rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy then they're doing now with a large share of an economy that is barely growing at all. It's not growing because there's not enough purchasing power in the middle class, and the lower-middle class and everybody aspiring to join the middle class, to keep the economy going.
We've seen this from the pioneering work of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty, looking back at tax records. They've brought that research up to 2012 and they see that 95 percent of the gains, the economic gains, since the recovery began in 2009, are going to the top 1 percent. Meanwhile, median household income keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation. Well, where are people going to get the money they need to keep the economy going? We can't go back into debt like we were in before 2008. So there's a fundamental threat to the economy.
There's also a very fundamental threat to the democracy we live in because, as even Louis Brandeis, the great jurist, understood in the late 19th century, when we last had this extraordinary gap, "We can either live in a democracy," he said, "or we can have a huge amount of wealth concentrated in few hands, but we can't have both."
