Writing and speaking precisely help you think precisely

Bo Sacks distributed a fun article titled “Copy editors know best: A journalist’s guide to avoiding common language missteps.”

It reminded me of my days as an editor.

I had the great good fortune of having two intelligent parents who spoke well and cared about grammar and such, but when I became an editor I realized how poorly I understood the rules. I had an instinctive sense for what “sounded right,” but I couldn’t tell you why.

Working as an editor – with no formal training – I kept Strunk and White, the AP Style Guide, and a dictionary at my fingertips at all times. I studied books on “confusables” so I’d know affect vs. effect and that sort of thing.

The most important skill an editor needs is to know when he should look something up.

Some of that language geekiness is still with me. To this day I yell at the TV when somebody says further when they mean farther, which when they mean that, or less when they mean fewer. It annoys me when people put an “and” in the middle of a number.

A lot of people don’t know that last one, so this is what I mean. 206,000 is “two hundred six thousand.” “Two hundred and six thousand” is 6,200.

And no, I don’t correct people at cocktail parties.

The point of speaking correctly is that it forces you to think precisely, which is a skill we seem to be losing. People are often unable to make careful distinctions.

Oh, I promised to explain that vs. which.

That introduces a clause that’s essential to the meaning of a sentence. Which introduces a clause that is not essential to the meaning of the sentence.

Imagine I have two red cars. One is parked in the driveway and one is parked on the street. I ask my friend, “would you please get my toolbox out of my red car that’s parked in the driveway.” The phrase “that’s parked in the driveway” is essential to the meaning of the sentence because that’s the car that has my toolbox.

Now imagine my two cars are a Toyota and a Honda. If I were to say, “My Honda, which is parked on the street, is low on gasoline.” In this case “which is parked on the street” is not essential to the meaning of the sentence because I only have one Honda.

Deciding whether to use that or which forces you to think logically. I think that’s a good thing.

Links

Copy editors know best: A journalist’s guide to avoiding common language missteps

https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/copy-editors-know-best-a-journalists-guide-to-avoiding-common-language-missteps,251857

Before you erect that paywall, here are some things to consider.

When advertising revenue declines, as it has been, publishers start to think about paywalls, as they have been.

I was talking with a client about this the other day and tried to come up with a list of things to consider when developing a paywall strategy. Here’s a quick summary.

Issues

What is your strategic goal with your content?

• Reach

• Revenue

• Leads

• Data

Some of those fit with a paywall and some don’t.

Is your content homogenous – for example, is it all articles – or do you have different types of content? And what about your audience? Are there distinct segments with different characteristics?

In either of those cases, you might need a different strategy by type of content or by audience segment. For example, short-form articles might remain free, but longer analysis could be gated, or college students get your content for free, while professionals have to pay.

When you present a restriction on access, which I’ll talk about in a minute, are prospects paying for present value or for the promise of future value?

Is content the main thing you sell, or is it a draw for something else? Does that differ by type of content?

Restrictions on access cause friction. Is your audience likely to put up with that?

Restrictions on access can affect SEO. Is that a problem? (Also, will SEO even be an issue a year from now?)

What do your competitors do?

Restrictions on access can also be a means of hiding your content from large language models.

Types of restriction on access to content

There are lots of different kinds of paywalls.

• Free registration (how much do you need to collect?)

• Subscription (what’s the term? Monthly, annual?)

• Membership (that includes more than just a subscription)

• Pay per view / micropayments

• Patronage

• Institutional access

• Geo-restricted (you have to live in this city to see this content)

• Content is only available in an app

• Content is only available as a download

You can also mix and match between these. It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole with this concept.

When does metering work?

Content characteristics

• Specialized and unique. Think The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.

• Perceived scarcity or urgency.

• Exclusive and in-depth.

• Content that retains its value over time.

Audience characteristics

• Loyal and engaged Professional

• Affluent

Brand characteristics

• Established and trusted

• Clear sense of value

While it’s good to have an instinctive reaction against censorship, some books should be banned for some people in some circumstances

The phrase “book banning” conjures up images of Puritans, McCarthyism, and even Nazis. A series of Supreme Court decisions starting in the 1950s overturned efforts to censor content and affirmed the rights of adults to read what they want – with some minor exceptions. They also affirmed the rights of states to protect children from certain material.

That seems to have been a strong consensus ever since. Until now.

The consensus has been broken in at least two ways.

First, efforts to restrict content available to children have been falsely labeled as “book bans.” The argument over banning books has always made a distinction between content for children and content for adults. To gloss over that distinction is to misrepresent the issue. It is perfectly appropriate to restrict what children have access to.

Second, there’s growing support for the idea that the government can decide what is mis-, dis-, or mal-information, and pressure social media companies to censor it. I find the concept horrifying and straight out of a totalitarian playbook. Do people really want to give the government the right to determine what can and can’t be said?

It makes me shudder.

I gave this podcast the provocative title, “Yes, we should ban books.” What do I mean by that?

First, it is appropriate for parents and communities to regulate what content is available to children. As I noted above, that shouldn’t be called a “book ban,” so … yes, I’m having that both ways so I can say something provocative.

Second, some content should be illegal even for adults. Child pornography comes to mind. Something like “How to make a nuclear bomb in your basement” … I’m not sure about that. Maybe. But there are some limits.

The conclusion is that while our free speech culture – which I support wholeheartedly – might lead us to have an instinctive negative reaction to the concept of “book bans,” we have to look a little closer. There are some situations where books should be banned.

Image creation

I write an article most weekdays, and it’s nice to have an image to go along with the article. It’s an interesting exercise because you have to convert the concept into something visual.

For example, I was writing about people using AI agents. How do you make that into a picture? The reality would probably be somebody talking into a headset, but that would just look like a phone call.

To make it seem like an AI agent, I created an image of someone speaking to a small robot.

Sometimes that process of converting the text into an image can give you ideas for the article.

An example here is my article on “fine lines” in business. What does that look like? I opted for a hiker on a narrow path with a steep drop on each side. That reinforces the idea of the potential peril of straying from the middle way.

To get summaries

I think it’s a good service to the reader to give a brief description of an article at the top. Some studies have shown that this increases engagement with an article, which is a little counter-intuitive. You might expect that some people would think “Ah, the summary is all I needed, thanks.” But I think that’s outweighed by the number of people who aren’t sold by the title, and need a little more.

In any event, I ask ChatGPT to write a 30 or so word summary of an article. I almost never use that summary verbatim, but it helps with the process and saves me some time.

To make sure I didn’t miss something important

An article idea is often a kind of generalization of a particular situation. The particular situation might be one magazine that, after a lengthy absence, went back into print. The more general idea is how print might or might not fit in the modern mix.

Sometimes it’s hard to get past the specifics of the particulars, so when I write an article like that I’ll upload it to ChatGPT and ask what topics I might have missed.

By the way, uploading content to ChatGPT means that it can use that content to train its circuits and so on, so you need to be careful with that one.

To get ideas

I write a lot, and I usually don’t have any trouble coming up with ideas. Sometimes I do, and in those cases I might upload a series of articles and ask ChatGPT what other topics would fit in the general theme of what I’ve written before.

The results aren’t great, honestly, but they can be helpful and they can give me a spark of an idea that I can pursue further.

In a way, it’s like using ChatGPT the way you’d use a thesaurus. A sentence might not seem quite right. You can upload the sentence, tell ChatGPT what doesn’t seem quite right, and it can give alternatives.

That’s where ChatGPT excels, because it is a large language model, after all.

To create an outline

If I have to give a presentation, or create a longer chunk of content, I’ll start by listing everything I can think of that’s relevant to that topic. I’ll work on that for a while, but then comes the hard task of putting it in order. ChatGPT does a decent job at that.

For example, let’s say I want to do a presentation on digital marketing. I can upload all the articles I’ve written on digital marketing and ask ChatGPT to create a table of contents.

I don’t let ChatGPT write for me, but I do let it help with organizing, summarizing, and finding gaps.

Other ideas

There are a lot of other ways to use AI that don’t apply to what I do. I’ll list a few of them here in case they spark some ideas on your end.

• Create a transcript, summary, outline, or article from a recording.

• Optimize content for SEO.

• Personalize content on the fly based on reader preferences, demographics, or behavior. (I’d be careful with that one, but it’s worth thinking about.)

• Translate your content into another language.

• Use data on content consumption to come up with new content ideas.

If you have a minute, drop me a line and tell me how you use AI in your business.

I’m finishing up a short book on customer data platforms. It’ll be available soon, so stay tuned.

Part of that process is creating the right cover. A cover can make or break a book.

How should I go about it?

Here are five approaches.

1. Go with my gut. That appeals to my ego, but I’m self-aware enough to know that I don’t have an artist’s eye. Back when I wore ties to work, I would have preferred to have someone else pick my tie for me. I’m not horrible at it, but some people see things in a way that I don’t. They have that knack.
   

2. Ask some friends. I have smart friends, and I’m sure many of them have better instincts than I do about such things. But they’re not experts on book covers, so while their guidance is helpful, I’m not sure that’s enough of an upgrade.
   

3. Consult an expert. If I get the right one, with the right experience and instincts for my market, that would be great. But I’m not sure how to find that person, and I don’t want to spend that kind of money.
   

4. Duplicate the style of similar book covers. There’s a lot of sense in that. The old saying is “don’t judge a book by its cover,” but everyone judges books by their covers all the time. We have expectations for different genres. You don’t expect a business book to have a fantasy dragon on the cover. Within that general concept, you have to have a sense of your target audience and what they would prefer. That’s hard to gauge, but it’s worth thinking about. For example, should you be more on the playful side or the serious side?
   

5. Try a few things and test them. This appeals to my marketing operations background. Also, it doesn’t really matter what I think, or what my friends think, or what an expert thinks. It matters what the market thinks.

I am going to test some covers, but I still have to choose what to test. I can’t try 600 different covers, so I have to go with some combination of the ideas above and narrow it down to just a couple.

Here’s what I’m doing. I don’t share this because I’m an expert. I’m not. I’m sharing this so you can think through the issues and come up with your own ideas – your own mix of these concepts.

I don’t want to defy genre expectations, but business book covers are boring. I want to be close to the edge of the genre expectation – without breaking it. It’s important to think about colors and typography, and what moods they evoke. I’m a man, so I see the world in Windows 16 colors, so I lean on my cover designer for color decisions. I’ll give a link to her below. She’s very good.

If you’re going to have more than one book, you want to maintain some sort of brand consistency. You want a design that you can copy – at least to some extent – so the books are recognizable as coming from your brand.

Consider formats and sizes. People will be seeing your cover in a lot of different settings. You want to make sure the text is readable and the images work no matter where they see your cover. Sometimes that’ll be a thumbnail on a very small screen.

The elephant in the room here is the book title, which is probably more important than the cover, and which I haven’t discussed at all. A lot of these same concepts apply to the title as well as the cover design. For example, it would be nice to A/B test a book title.

If you’re designing a book cover, think about these issues, and let me know what you come up with.

Also, keep an eye out for my new book. You can let me know what you think of the cover, but I’m going to do a split test and pick the one that gets more clicks.

Last week I did a podcast on how AI agents will change content consumption, and some listeners wanted to hear more about that. Coincidentally, Bo Sacks distributed a very good article on that topic by Matthew Scott Goldstein, which I’ll link below.

Think back to those old news feeds that would ask you to pick your favorite topics and design your own home page. You could organize them into a custom dashboard – like creating your own front page. The Yahoo home page worked that way. You might have sports on top, then politics, then lifestyle, and so on.

To understand AI agents, take that concept and multiply it by 100. In your sports section, you’ll be able to say which sports, which teams, which players – maybe only the players on your fantasy football team – and which writers you want to follow.

You’ll be able to do the same with every section of your daily news, getting very granular about exactly what you want to hear.

That is, if you want to hear it. AI can transform content from an article to five bullet points, or a summary, or convert it into audio, and soon, video. Or the other way around. After you listen to a podcast, your AI agent will be able to give you a transcript, or a summary of the key points. You’ll be able to listen to an opinion piece and ask what the other side has to say about that.

You won’t need ABC news to “fact check” a politician. Your AI agent will do it for you – from whatever point of view you prefer.

I’m just scratching the surface of what’s possible to give you an idea of what working with an AI agent could be like. Just as Spotify and Netflix give you suggestions on songs and shows you might appreciate, your AI agent will be able to recommend other sources and services.

This won’t be limited to news, or articles from websites. Your AI agent will have access to social media, videos, articles, books, magazines, podcasts … and it will be able to scour all that material, find what you want, and present it in the style and format you prefer.

If you want Bilbo Baggins to summarize and explain what’s going on with Rings of Power, your AI will do that for you.

I hope that gives you a sense of the possibilities.

I mentioned Bilbo Baggins on purpose, because that introduces us to the next big element of this. Copyright.

Somebody owns the rights to Bilbo Baggins. If I want to use him, I’ll have to pay for the privilege.

It might work something like this. I tell my AI that I want to watch Bilbo give me summaries of what’s going on in Rings of Power, and to present important background details from Tolkien’s works. That would require a license to use Bilbo’s image, access to Rings of Power footage, and access to Tolkien’s collected works. My AI would then contact the people who own those rights, negotiate a payment, and present me with a solution. All in microseconds.

Whoever owns the book rights would have a fee structure.

Access to the text costs $20. A license to summarize or explain the text is another $20. The use of Bilbo’s image and voice costs 10 cents per minute of video footage, or 5 cents per minute of audio. And on and on it goes.

This means that publishers are going to have to start thinking about how to license their content to AI agents. It won’t be left sitting out there in the open, on a web page, where pirates and rapscallions mistakenly and unlawfully use it for free. The content will be protected and doled out by permission.

AI agents will open up the world for consumers. For myself, I can imagine going on a walk and asking my agent to summarize John Vervake’s works on Neoplatonism, then I’ll pick one area I want to delve into a little deeper and ask it to create a video that I can watch that evening.

It will be a whole new world, and content creators need to start planning now.

Links

AI revolution for news publishers is only getting started

https://pressgazette.co.uk/comment-analysis/ai-revolution-for-news-publishers-is-only-getting-started/

I love tea. I love the bitterness and the astringency. I love the aroma. I love that it has no calories. And yes, I love the caffeine, although caffeine doesn’t love me.

I’ve tried many alternatives to tea, and none of them are very good. This morning I wanted to give it another try and find something to experiment with. I’m a home brewer, so I have an interesting assortment of different herbs laying around, and we have regular kitchen herbs and such as well. But which should I try?

Imagine that I tried to solve this through search. It would be agonizing. I’d try a search phrase, then I’d have to wade through five or six lousy results pages (with all their ads and their “what you really want is way at the bottom” writing style). Then I’d realize I need to modify my search, and go through the whole mess again.

It would take a long time, and unless I got very lucky, the results would be underwhelming.

Now imagine having a conversation with ChatGPT. It’s so easy. (In fact, I just did it on this very question and got some interesting suggestions.)

If I don’t get my query right, I just say, “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant this.” And it adjusts. It’s amazing. I use it all the time. I’ve even installed an app on my phone so I can talk to ChatGPT while I’m driving.

Search has essentially been replaced. Earlier I made an analogy between search and print, because – just like print – search won’t die. It will just settle into a smaller niche. There are still times when you need search, like when you have the name of a company and want to find their website, or their username on X. Things like that.

I find I use ChatGPT more often than I use search.

What are the implications for publishers?

For starters, a whole genre of internet writing will disappear. You know what I mean. The “I’ll answer your question after I tell you about Aunt Martha and her six cats, and make you wade through three or four intrusive ads” genre. There won’t be any point in that, thank God.

Writing for search engines will decline.

ChatGPT is awesome, but something even more awesome is coming. AI agents.

I recently watched that old Joaquin Phoenix movie “Her.” If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth watching, although there’s a chat-sex scene in the beginning you should skip. It’s very disturbing.

The protagonist, Theodore, tries out a new operating system that’s essentially ChatGPT, but with a voice and a personality. He’s a lonely fellow, and “Samantha” — the AI — voiced very effectively by Scarlett Johanson -- becomes his daily companion.

He falls in love with it.

I hope you’re not such a loser that you would fall in love with AI. That is a problem humanity is going to have to reckon with. Birth rates are already too low. Still, let’s avoid that side of it for a moment and think about how useful it will be to have an AI assistant like that.

Back to publishers. How are you planning to fit in to that ecosystem? Because that’s where we’re going to be very soon. People won't use Google to find things. They'll chat with their AI assistant, which will learn their preferences and recommend things.

How are you preparing to survive?

I have some ideas, and I’d love to chat with you about it. Give me a call.

There's a fine line between being data-driven and losing touch with the people behind the numbers.

“Data-driven” is overused. It’s actually very easy to be misled by data. I’ll post a link to an article on that topic below.

"Data are just summaries of thousands of stories—tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful."

— Chip & Dan Heath

That’s a good point, but what I especially like is that it requires you to make sure your interpretation of the data lines up with reality.

"Without data, you're just another person with an opinion. But data without understanding is just noise."

— Adapted from W. Edwards Deming

There's a fine line between a visionary leader and an out of touch dreamer.

When does something move from being deep and insightful to being crazy?

“Vision without execution is hallucination.” — Thomas Edison

There's a fine line between an inclination to action and being a bull in a china shop.

An “inclination to action” is a good quality. You don’t want people who are content to sit around waiting. At the same time, you have to look before you leap.

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."

— Alfred North Whitehead

There’s a fine line between attention to detail and being a micromanager.

It’s very possible to be aware of the details of a project without making sure everything is done the way you want it to be done.

"Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results."

— George S. Patton

"The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

— Theodore Roosevelt

There’s a fine line between standardization and stifling creativity.

I was riding with my dad in a rental car one time, and he couldn’t find the switch for the wipers, or something. He said “there should be a law that every car made in America has the wipers in the same place.” Which makes sense from one point of view, but it doesn’t allow carmakers to innovate and come up with new ideas that work better.

"Rules should be guidelines, not straightjackets."

— Douglas Bader

"Efficiency is important, but it’s the creative breakthroughs that drive real progress."

— Bill Gates (paraphrased)

There's a fine line between striving for excellence and being paralyzed by perfection.

"Perfect is the enemy of done."

— lots of people, with apologies to Voltaire who said “perfect is the enemy of good.”

"Have no fear of perfection—you’ll never reach it."

— Salvador Dalí