"Bill Gates once asked me, 'Could you make me more human?' I said, 'Being human is overrated.'"

This doubly priceless quote comes from Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton's former campaign strategist. (Hat tip: The Atlantic.)

When it comes to writing copy, the human touch is still vital. Here are some tips for making copy that reads like a human being wrote it.  Continue reading...

My company, Articulate Marketing, helps big tech companies communicate better about their products and services. A large part of my work is writing editorial-style content for websites. My credentials are my work for HP, Microsoft, eBay and others.

In the past couple of weeks, several people have asked me for advice about becoming a web copywriter, so here it is.  Continue reading...

I heard a great joke the other day: "If you gave an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, eventually one of them would write Hey Hey We're the Monkees!" I liked it so much that I used it on my website. It came back to me this morning as I was thinking about buzzwords. I mean, how do people come up with the jargon that gets stuffed into press releases and so on?  Continue reading...

Less than a year after I started Bad Language, it's still a surprise to me that a) it's been as successful as it has been and b) people now ask me for advice about starting a blog. Equally, nobody told me the whole thing would be so much fun.  Continue reading...

"Two peoples divided by a common language." George Bernard Shaw said this about the British and the Americans, but the same can be said of anoraks and suits.  Continue reading...

Most emails are badly written. No surprise, perhaps, since we write more emails than anything else. By 2010, the business world will have produced 27,000 billion gigabytes of email. So what goes wrong?  Continue reading...