Stephen Fry is awesomesauce

"Make good art!" Interestingly, he spends a lot of time explaining how to get around the imposter syndrome. I don't know if he has battled it, but it does sound like he gets that question from aspiring writers. Anyway, it's good advice!

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives. The goal of a “regular” text is to inform or entertain. The goal of Web copy (and ideally your website in general) is to get people to do something—to sign up, make a purchase, or something similar. Hiring a professional copywriter can be very expensive, which is one of the reasons why this is a valuable skill to have yourself.

lets get writing!

Many dismiss copywriting as something that ad agency people do. Truthfully, all of us need to pay close attention to copywriting if we want to achieve our business objectives.

Paul Ford is interesting

"Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it."

Markdown is a (web) writer’s best friend. Markdown is an incredibly simple, lightweight markdown language and a lightweight perl script which takes plaintext files using the special Markdown syntax and converts them into HTML files, ready for publication on the web. Better yet, the syntax of Markdown is very easy to learn and simple resulting in “source” files that will be readable in the plaintext format they are written in, even if they haven’t been converted to HTML. Created by John Gruber, he designed Markdown’s syntax to be incredibly easy to read and for the Markdown project to be used by web writers who could, essentially, publish the plaintext markdown files “as is” and the content would still be readable. It’s an incredibly useful tool for any writer and it’s something which all writers should take some time to learn, largely because it takes just a few minutes to do so (well, maybe a little more).

“Writing microcopy is hard, but also, some people are just stupid.” — pretty much explains it.