The Em Dash Is NOT an AI Tell: Justice for the Em Dash!
Some say that artificial intelligence has killed the em dash. Ann Handley would say otherwise. She shares her thoughts.
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4 Important Writing Tips from Warren Buffett’s Letter to Shareholders
Warren Buffett published his much-celebrated annual Letter to Shareholders yesterday. I noticed it was out while I was on a flight home from LA, just as JetBlue and I were 30,000 feet over Nebraska. Nebraska. Buffett. Me. Coincidence? I. THINK. NOT. (To quote The Incredibles‘ Bernie Kropp.) By the time I landed in Boston, analysts and commentators and journalists were all over it. Here’s a hilarious thing: Yahoo can’t seem to get its email client right. But even before the letter’s official release, Yahoo had produced a video highlight reel with Warren’s letter’s best quotes. And by “hilarious” I mean funny-eyeroll. Not funny-ha-ha. Let that sink in for a minute: A letter gets its own trailer. Yes, the letter is written by the world’s most famous investor. But still. Warren doesn’t care about any of them, though. Not the New York Times or MarketWatch or Yahoo’s letter-trailer. He writes his
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Why the Instagram v. Vine Debate Is the Wrong Conversation
The debate over whether Instagram’s new video tool will kill Vine, a platform which offers people a similar ability to create super-short stop-motion “films,” is the wrong argument. Instead, the question we should be debating is: Will Instagram’s new video tool gut Instagram’s wonderful photo tool? In other words, I’m less worried about Instagram killing Vine than I am worried about it diluting the very thing that made Instagram so wonderful to begin with. Immediately following Thursday’s Instagram announcement, it seemed that every technology site, content marketer and Twitter commenter put Vine and Instagram video in opposite corners of the ring. A trending hashtag on Twitter (which, ironically, owns Vine) on Thursday was #UsingVineIsLike, which mocked Vine as hopelessly unhip and old-school through comments like this: #UsingVineIsLike Checking myspace to see if you got a friend request. — OfficialAndOnly™ (@_AfricanKingg) June 20, 2013 Why the debate? “Both [Vine and Instagram video] are short-form video
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‘My Imaginary Well-Dressed Toddler Daughter’: The Story and Content Lessons of the Best Pinterest Board Ever
This is the story of Quinoa, a small, trendy child who wears haute couture and a model’s aloof expression. It’s also the story of how a hilarious Pinterest board for a fake child blew up this week on the interwebs, growing its follower base more than 100-fold in 24 hours, from around 100 to almost 11,000 (at last count). First, the child: More than a legend in her own playroom, Quinoa is an icon in the fashion world who always has the perfectly accessorized outfit no matter her mood or activity: She wears a chevron maxi for a stroll through a field of wildflowers; an outdoorsy kilt and cloak for a damp stroll by a bog; and totes a spare “urban outfit” in her mother’s purse in the event they’re going to be around a lot of chain link fencing. Pleather crushes her tiny soul. So does the poverty, which